Time – or the lack of it

With half an eye, I saw an interesting program in Japan’s NHK – “Close Up Gendai” (Gendai = presence, our times) while preparing my dinner. They talked for half an hour about the “worth” and significance of one second in our times and the urge in various fields of life, for example sports or business, to break down seconds into ever smaller time units to maximize and optimize results, profit, etc.

Nowadays, especially in the developed nations and even more especially in mega cities, time is something we never have enough of. Sometimes I wonder how indigenous tribes left in the Amazon region perceive time, for example. Quite differently, I am sure, and most likely they will not feel our lack of time to such an extent.

I myself am struggling with time every day personally as well as professionally. Personally because I have three jobs – company (to pay my rent), writing books and marketing them. In my new day-job I am also dealing more with time than in my old one, since kaizen or any form of improvement needs one thing to kick in: Time.

You need time to investigate a problem, then time to find reasons for the problem and appropriate counter measures and more time to implement those counter measures and time again to check if they were effective and more time when you find that they are not and have to investigate the problem again. And time is what my colleagues, who want their problems to be solved, have the least of, since they are drowning in their daily tasks.

So every day (more or less) I find myself preaching to various people that it takes time to change and hopefully improve something, and that they have to invest time in order to save time in the future.

If there is one experience I have made during my nine months now as a consultant it is that if you take the time to step back and reflect on your daily problems, or that if you take a time-out and just have a team building workshop without discussing your problems, people are happier. Trust is a function of time, the more time you invest into it, the higher is the level of trust. Just this week, I facilitated a big team building workshop with 40 people from 6 different nations. The bosses of the team had decided to take a time-out and to not work on their project that day but just on getting to know each other better. A good decision, everybody liked the time-out and gave positive feedback and felt motivated afterwards.

People need time but we have less and less of it these days.

I wonder where that lack of time in our fast-paced society will lead to. One thing seems obvious, more and more mentally unstable people, stress, depression, anxiety, panic attacks…

So what’s a second really worth? More than any money can buy, I think.