The Campbell Academy Blog (73)

Time Gained/Time Spent

This week, I've mostly been consumed preparing a lecture, which will be split into two webinars for Straumann and recorded on Monday in Switzerland.

The purpose of the lecture is to explain the concept of efficiency, but it's effectively to promote Straumann's online shop where people can buy their dental implants.

Straumann finds that as a global organisation doing thousands and thousands of transactions a day, lots and lots of people still want to phone their business manager to put the order through or, at best, get their nurse to call the business manager.

In modern days, this is obviously a ridiculously inefficient way of doing things both for but also for the individuals that are doing it, when in fact, they could just train and empower their team to work with the technology to make it much quicker and much more effective with much less mistakes, and then you'd have the time to spend on something else.

And that's the message, isn't it?

The message is that we have the opportunity to use technology to create time for ourselves, but the real question is what we do with the time that we create.

It's no use using technology to find more technology to use more technology, to spend more time finding out how to use more technology to get quicker and quicker to use more technology.

It's about whether you have enough (See the Gareth Bale blog, which is coming in the next few days).

It's important that we're able to set a stop point and say, "The time that I create here, I will spend over here".

It's fine to spend the time that you create to make more money if you need or want more money but it's also fine to spend the time you create doing something which has nothing to do with your work and this is the thing that all of us who are caught in the whirlwind of hyper capitalism seem to struggle with.

I remember watching television programmes when I was a boy (Tomorrow's World), which promised a world where we would all be helped by automated machines and devices to create so much more time that leisure time would be in massive excess.

It never quite worked out that way, seemingly, did it?

The time that we saved with a mechanical dishwasher, we spent on our laptops working in the evenings.

It is possible to use technology to be more human; I think that's the essence of what we teach in our business courses.

It's another thing to actually walk the talk and spend the time that you create doing something which is not to do with making money and not to do with making you even more efficient to make even more money.