In a previous article, I commented on the “truths” that I learned or believed over the years that are no longer true at all. You may remember that one example was Pluto which was a planet when I learned about the Solar System, but which is now not a planet after all.
One of the truths that changed over time is “Business is business; personal is personal.” I talked about how what used to be separate worlds have merged and we now live in a single world where personal and business inter-mix.
Today, I want to address time. Again, I must contrast today’s reality with the reality that existed in the past. It is this comparison that helps us understand why we think like we do and why we must change.
When I started working in the mid-1970’s, as an “Assistant Accountant” at Peat Marwick, I was assigned a secretary. (Boy, did I feel like a hot shot telling my folks I had a secretary! Never mind that I shared her with about 20 other people!) One of my secretary’s main jobs was to take phone messages and make sure we got them.
There was no such thing as Voice Mail. A person took the message, wrote it on a pink paper, filed it in a cubby with my name on it and when I called in for messages, she pull what was in my cubby and read the messages to me. Or if I showed up in the office, I could go grab the messages out of the cubby myself. So, turnaround time of phone message being left and then returned was at least half a day.
Phones were much faster than mail. Mail of course would take two to three days to arrive and then one had to write a letter back, have the secretary dress it up, run though a few edits, and then get mailed back. This was at least a two day process, so a return mail was often a week after the original letter was sent.
If we had overseas correspondence, the one week turn around was even slower. Remember air letters? So, we had this cool machine off in the corner that was called a Telex machine. We could draft a correspondence to someone overseas and the secretary would key it into the Telex, creating a long tape with holes. That tape was the transcript of the conversation. We could send the tape at the end of business and by morning, there would be a new tape with the transcript of the reply. So, we could actually correspond with someone overseas with overnight turnaround.
I have one final example to set the stage of where we were with respect to time. Remember computers? There were mainframe computers that had tapes and disk drives that had massive amounts of data on them. We could write a computer program to analyze the data and key them onto punch cards (Hollerith) which we would assemble into a deck. We’d put these cards between special cards with were the JCL (job control language) that would tell the computer which devices we were using and where they were, etc. If we submitted a job into the computer, we could often expect a result in about two hours. I remember going to the data center in the middle of the night to get better turnaround time.
So, if you were around in the mid-1970’s, you may recall that our business life operated a pace where phone messages took half a day to get to person, computer programs took two hours to run, communication overseas could be done overnight (once a day), written correspondence took about a week.
In the 1980’s the fax machine was invented. Now we could send a document or image to someone else in five minutes. This was absolutely revolutionary, except you had to have a fax machine at each end. And voicemail was invented. We could even put these machines in our homes to get the messages when we missed calls. Secretaries would still intercept calls when we were out of the office, but they would put you into voicemail to leave your message. (What did the secretaries do anymore??)
By the 1990’s, email starting taking hold. At first, people would make up silly names for their email addresses, to keep themselves anonymous. (Remember the movie You’ve Got Mail? That was 1998!) Then email became a business staple but you had to be at your computer to see the email. So turnaround on an email was frequently half a day.
Then, in the early 2000’s Blackberry’s started popping up. Imagine, you could get email on a mobile device, not just while you were at the computer. This was a game changer.
Since those early Blackberry days, we now have smartphones in our children’s hands, laptops and tablets, texting, hot spots, and a myriad of devices that compress time into incredibly small units.
My office phone rings in my office and on my cell phone. It follows me. There is no reason for me not to get a phone call unless I’m in a meeting, already on the phone, or in the bathroom. If I do get a voicemail message, my phone alerts me and it is translated to text so I can see it on my phone or my iPad. Phone calls are expected to be returned in minutes.
Email reaches me in the office, on my smart phone, and on my iPad. There are times when not responding immediately to an email means the loss of a deal because someone else responded sooner.
I think faxing is dead. I now can scan an image using my smart phone and send the PDF via email even when away from my office. My inbound faxes come to me as PDFs via email, so they could have been sent by email in the first place. In the next ten years, we will no longer see fax numbers listed on our business cards.
So what does this compression of time mean to us? Well first, it means we need to move with the times. If we aren’t living in this instant world with the internet at our fingertips (and in our pockets on our many devices) then we are living in the past. If we don’t learn to be nimble and respond quickly, we will miss opportunities. “The early bird gets the worm” has been totally redefined.
We have to learn to make decisions more quickly, take action more quickly, juggle more things in our heads at one time, keep track of multiple projects at one time. Everything must be done fairly quickly. In my opinion, gone are the days when you could work on a project all day and not take any interruptions. I think you can do that for windows of time during the day – maybe two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. But beyond that, I think you need to be plugged in, available, and engaged.
Some people will like this new way of operating. Some people will feel overwhelmed and pressured. Personally, I love it. I find that being a partner at B2B CFO is a career that suits this new way of operating. I work on multiple clients, but I never know in a day which one will call with a new issue. I enjoy having to be nimble in my thinking, changing gears quickly, recalling the context of a question that came up last week that I haven’t really thought about until Client A emailed with a question.
Some will say it is inefficient to bounce from one thing to another. I agree that too much bouncing is inefficient. I have learned to parcel my time into one hour increments. I can spend an hour on something with focused attention. Then I look up and see what has occurred that needs my attention, tend to those things, and then dive into the next project for an hour.
In closing, I’d like to suggest that those of us “older” folks readjust our internal clocks to the new compressed time. Don’t be surprised when others expect response quickly. Don’t be surprised when those that do respond quickly get more opportunities than those that don’t. Don’t be Pluto.
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