About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
Amen.
Spot-on as usual, Dan. The more I think about these issues, the more I think of them as generalizing to all sorts of situations in which the wise course is to remember that "Just because we have Tool X doesn't mean we have to use it."
The edge case might be nuclear weapons, but it also applies to everything from television to electric can openers. Maybe grandma needs an electric can opener because her arthritis keeps her from using a manual one - but what about you and me? Spend a tiny fraction of the money for the manual one, which (a) fits easily in the utensil drawer, and (b) will last you years and years without your having to worry about the motor burning out.
As for my e-mail habits, I've been much better lately about shutting Outlook done while I'm working. I find I can go a couple of hours during the workday without checking it - with no penalties whatsoever.