Soundbites

The hours we squander

Ever wonder how much time you waste on telephone trees? (Or are you too hip to use a telephone?)

“Your call is important to us....” (But not important enough to answer in person.)

“Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed recently....” (How is it possible that so many companies have had to change their menu options? Or do they just buy these comments from Excuses ‘R Us?)

The trees can be taller in Canada, where many offices greet you in both English and French, then add, “For service in English, press One....” By then 20 seconds are gone, plus those wasted on reciting office hours, telling you how important you are and letting you know that the call “may be monitored for training purposes.”

A treed company may protest — “it’s only a minute.” Uh-huh. Multiply that by thousands of callers and it adds up. You can feel the sand falling, grain by grain, in the hourglass of life.

In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson relates an incident from the early days of the Macintosh computer. Jobs, known as a despotic fussbudget, complained that the Macintosh operating system took too long to boot up. “If it could save a person’s life,” he asked one of the engineers, “would you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” The engineer conceded that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and sketched some figures. If five million people used the Mac, and it took 10 seconds less to turn it on every day, it would add up to three hundred million hours per year that people would save, which Jobs calculated was equal to a hundred lifetimes saved every year. The engineer was impressed — and motivated. Within a few weeks he managed to trim not 10 seconds but 28 seconds off the boot-up time.

It is amazing how much less time we’d waste if we put our minds to it.

Brian Tracy, professional development trainer, has written, “One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not to be done at all.”

Cool phone

I sometimes wonder what our world would be like if Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone years after someone else had come up with e-mailing, texting, tweeting et al. “What, you mean I can actually talk to someone directly instead of punching out all my little mis-spelled messages on this stubby little keyboard? How cool is that?” — Dan Turner in The Globe & Mail

Zap the trash

God has chosen to order the world in such a way that our food isn’t just miraculously zapped into our refrigerators each day. Clothes do not grow on trees, nor do our houses assemble themselves. The trash

we produce doesn’t just magically disappear each evening. And human society doesn’t naturally remain ordered. All of this happens through the process we call “work.” And we love other people by helping make all of these things happen. — Sebastian Traeger and Greg Gilbert in The Gospel at Work: How Working for King Jesus Gives Purpose and Meaning to our Jobs

Loners?

Contrary to the fabled lore of the lone genius slaving away in their studio loft, occasionally gracing the public, then returning to their space to crank away at their masterwork, most of the great work that’s accomplished is done in the context of a community. Very few people are able to stay aligned and engaged without others in their life to help fuel their passions. — Todd Henry in Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day

First Nations jobs

I keep telling government they should concentrate on economic development and then we wouldn’t be in this mess. The original treaty relationship was a business relationship. It wasn’t a dependency relationship.... Even at the national level I never hear the national chiefs talk about that. They always talk about poverty. What is all this talk about poverty? You’ll never get rid of poverty without jobs. Talk about jobs. Quit talking about poverty. — Clarence Louie, chief of the economically thriving Osoyoos Band in British Columbia, in The Globe & Mail

Making sense

[T]he good news of the gospel ... has deep implications for the here and now. It has implications for morality and education, for politics and justice, for art and music, for business and finance. In all those areas and more, God calls his children to new perspectives which, like the new birth itself, may at first seem foolish. But the more we keep exploring them, and the more we learn to trust God’s ways in all those areas of life, the more he makes sense to us. — Joel Belz in World magazine