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.
Ah, but Google (and Spotlight) do have their limitations
Thanks for all your comments.
One problem with Google, Spotlight, Windows desktop search, and all those other powerful programs is that they can only find keywords -- and sometimes your document doesn't have those keywords. For example, my wife handles the scheduling for her section at the hospital, and each month she asks her coworkers to submit their vacation requests. What keywords does she search for in this stack of replies?
- "I'm out on the 5th and 6th."
- "I'm on vacation the 5th and 6th."
- "I won't be here the 5th and 6th."
- "I'm away the 5th and 6th."
- "I'll be skiing the 5th and 6th."
Now, I suppose if she created a template for submitting schedule requests, that would make it simple to find all the related emails. But that would require her coworkers to use a specific form - and as Mark knows, it's not always easy to get doctors to follow even the simplest instructions (washing hands, for example).
Perhaps there's a middle way?