Banish Bureaucracy, Become A Time Ninja!

Before you start reading today, try this…Pause. Think about a place that you love. Close your eyes and go there for a while…see it, smell it, hear its sounds, feel it, be there…

I hope that your eyes are closed…seriously, if you didn’t close your eyes, go back to that first paragraph, give it a try…

There, isn’t that better? You just slowed down time. You’re probably not yet ready to tangle with Dr. Strange, but you did slow down time. Well done.

In last week’s letter I had said that, at some point, I would write to you about time. Then, this week Mouse asked “Where go the hours? Where go the days?” and I knew that what I was sensing last week, that it was time to write about time, was right, so here we are…

It is worth noting this often-forgotten fact, the time that rules our world, the minutes that tick by on our watches (what a sweetly anachronistic phrase revealing my age, it’s much more likely to be ‘flash by on our phones’), the lights we use to extend the day, the thirty-minute demarcations in our calendars, the calendars themselves – all the things that we experience as time, that we use to govern our time, all of them, are inventions that we have created and imposed upon ourselves.

I am reminding us of this, because if we hold time as something that is created, then we can start to think about how we mould it to serve our lives. For in reality, there is a different type of time, a type that is fluid, that adheres to more natural rhythms, it is the progress of days into nights, the unfolding of a new dawn, the emergence of a new season – that is the rhythm that pulses beneath the ticking, beeping, straight-jacket that we’ve strapped our lives into.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health conducted an experiment where he placed volunteers in a fourteen-hour period of darkness. His purpose was to understand what happened with our sleep patterns when we had no watches, no light, nothing but our own rhythms to guide us. By the fourth week, the participants would lie awake for an hour or two and then abruptly fall asleep and sleep for between three to five hours. Then, they would wake for another hour or two for what Wehr called ‘quiet rest’, and then they would drift back into sleep for another three to five hours.

Clark Strand in his delightful book, Waking Up To The Dark, tells us that Wehr discovered in this kind of sleep our levels of prolactin doubled over that of our normal waking levels. He explains that “Prolactin is the hormone that keeps birds still when they’re sitting on their nest and mammals quietly at rest when they’re sleeping. Its levels also rise in nursing mothers when their milk levels let down, keeping them clam and attentive to their babies’ needs…Prolactin creates a feeling of security, quietness, and peace. And it is intimately, and biologically, tied to the dark. Enter the darkness and stay there – without checking your cell phone or turning on the lights – and the darkness, like a mother or lover, will take you in her embrace.”

And with that, you see that clock time and real time are different beasts, so let’s get creative – how might we work with time, so that the tyrannical, stressful blur of time that stresses Mouse, Bird, and us, becomes something that serves us a little better?

/Strategy

On occasion, my clients share anecdotes of being trapped in hours-long meetings where all the people in the meeting are messaging each other memes, emojis and all manner of ephemera to express their boredom – they’re there, but not there. I know that you’ve had similar experiences. Sit down with your team, reflect on the last quarter. What meetings were a waste of time? Explore ideas about different ways of achieving the same outcome more effectively. Give it try. Reflect and integrate the learning

In other instances, there is the bizarre bureaucracy of corporate policies that waste time. Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, eradicated a whole range of policies that took up time. His rationale was he wanted that time to be spent on creativity and innovation not getting travel approvals. As a control, Netflix finance does spot audits of outlying travel expenditure because every now and then, someone abuses the system. However, the overwhelming majority don’t and they, and the business, get the benefit of more time spent on their actual roles.

Roche went one step further and did an experiment in which they eradicated travel policies and approvals but made all the information transparent – anyone in the business could view your travel expenditure. The result? Not only did it save time, 45% of people in the experiment reported improved job satisfaction.

Horst Schulze, co-founder of the Ritz Carlton group, knew that a loyal customer would spend $200,000 with them over their lifetime. His guests were discerning, time-starved people. He authorised everyone in the business to be able to spend up to $2,000 to rectify any mistake that inconvenienced a customer. ‘Sort out the pain as quickly as possible’, was his thinking. It worked.  He reflects “That was an economic decision. It was not a decision to throw away money.”

In each instance, these companies sought to eradicate an element of bureaucracy to free people to focus on the business’s core purpose.

What is your company’s purpose? What elements of bureaucracy devour time? What experiment could you conduct to test alternate approaches? Give it try, learn from it, tweak where necessary and then scale it to the business. Hey presto! More time!

Self

Time is often manipulated to serve others’ objectives. Think about those deal sites with their countdown clocks, somehow convincing you that your world will end without that purchase. Or the endless beeps of notifications calling you to spend time, lubricating the advertising engine of someone else’s social media site. Well, why not manipulate time for yourself? Become a time ninja!

Think about savouring a glass of your favourite wine. You swirl it in the glass. You smell it. You sip it and let it roll over your tastebuds. You breathe and contemplate the tastes. There’s the satisfaction of that mouthful of your favourite food. There’s the pause in front of a painting where you watch the dance of colours that the artist has magicked out of the oil. There’s the gazing into your lover’s eyes. You can slow time.

Slow your speech, suddenly you’re less rushed. There’s more time.

Look at the colours around you, seek out the shades of green that you can see. More present. More time.

When that traffic light turns amber, slow down, think ‘this is exciting, I get two minutes at a red light where I can breathe in, breathe out.’

Get rid of the rush. It’s a guaranteed spell to give you a slower, more manageable, richer life.

We are most productive, most creative, most effective we can bring deep, uninterrupted thought to the topic at hand. So, create time blocks in your diary. Eradicate distractions during that time. Explore how you might do that for your whole organisation. At Patagonia, the pattern-making group (part of the design department) has a sign in their area that reads “PLEASE OBSERVE QUIET TIME. Closed from 8:00 to 12:00”.

Spend time on the things that are your strengths, the things that you’re good at and leave you feeling energised. Time stretches and it’s a powerful way to build momentum. You love doing it. You’re energised by it. Suddenly, there’s more time in the day.

Soul

All our religions and our philosophies tell us to be kind to others. If that’s not sufficient incentive, it may help to know that Dr. Waguih William Ishak, a professor of psychiatry, says “We all seek a path to happiness, practicing kindness toward others is one we know works.” Psychologist Martin Seligman explains “Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.”

How? Well, when we’re kind to others, our bodies release oxytocin and dopamine, and increases serotonin, all hormones that make for a happier life.

More kindness, more happiness, less stress, more sense of time (Thank you Dave Duarte for reminding me of this truth).

I hope that you have fun playing with time this week. Share this letter with friends, create a cadre of time warriors!

To close today, I had to share Siphiwe Mpye’s editorial from this month’s Wanted Magazine. In December, Siphiwe had asked me to write a piece reflecting on the pain of the past two years and how we might find meaning in this third year of the pandemic. His editorial shares some of my words. I feel blessed by his reflections and our almost twenty years of friendship.

I ended the article with this thought, “We know now that a different life is possible. We’ve seen it, we’ve tasted it, we’ve lived it. We just have to choose it. We only have to act. It is our choice. The flames that were lit by pain have shown the possibility of a new path. We should take it. After all, we want to be our best.”

Go be kind, to yourself, to others, to the world.

Karl

(this letter was first published on 6 Feb 2022)