Spend time. Save time. Waste time. Buy time. — Time is counted like money.
Time well spent. — The time produced something worth its cost.
On the clock. Off the clock. On company time. — Paid time and unpaid time.
I won’t take up much of your time. — A promise made before asking for something.
I’ll give you ten minutes back. — We will end the meeting early.
Thanks for your time. — A standard thank-you at the end of a call or a meeting.
In 2021 four researchers from Ohio State, Rutgers and Harvard published studies on people who agree with statements like “Time spent on leisure activities is often wasted time.” Such people enjoyed leisure less. They also reported lower happiness and more depression, anxiety and stress.
Their advice was practical. “If leisure can be framed as having some kind of productive goal, that helps people who think leisure is wasteful,” said Rebecca Reczek of Ohio State.
On July 21, 1748, Benjamin Franklin wrote “Advice to a Young Tradesman,” addressed to “my Friend A. B.” Early in the piece he writes: “Remember that Time is Money.” A man who can earn ten shillings a day and “sits idle one half of that Day” has lost more than the sixpence he spent on amusement. “He has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.”
The phrase itself is older. It was in print by 1719.
One way to get a sense for the importance of short lines of communications within an American team is to observe those lines. Team meetings: How often are they scheduled? How long do they last? Who takes part in them? What topics are addressed? How much detail do they go into?
Team or staff meetings play an important role in American teams. They help management and the team maintain an overview of their most important work. Information flow is supported. Current developments, problems, complexities can be addressed immediately. If well run, staff meetings can be motivating. Management remains „in touch“ with the team.
Frequent meetings are standard practice in the American business culture. According to the National Statistics Council, 37% of managers and white collar worker time is spent in meetings. Other data indicate there are 11 million business meetings every day or roughly 3 billion meetings per year. According to a Verizon study, „Busy professionals attend over 60 meetings each month. However, most say they cannot attend all meetings to which they are invited due to the tremendous demands on their time.“
The Verizon study found that “different meeting types were characterized by different patterns of meeting purposes. On average, in-person meetings are more likely to be sales-related, video conferences are more likely to be centered around updates and information-sharing, and audio conferences tend to consist of updates, brainstorming, and strategy development.”
According to a study done by the University of Tulsa and the University of Arizona, about 25 percent of American business meetings were between 31 and 61 minutes long. “The average time participants spend to prepare for, travel to, and attend an in-person meeting involving five people is 53 hours and 24 minutes. This is more than three times the time involved in an audio or video conference meeting.”
When meetings are required somebody must decide who should be invited and who should be excluded. One researcher found that “not having the ‘right’ people is one of the leading causes of unproductive meetings.” More than a third (34%) of 3M Study participants report only some (30%) relevant people attended meetings.
A common complaint from American businesspeople is that key decision makers are not present at meetings. Therefore, much time is wasted discussing topics that no one at the table has the authority to make decisions about.
However, another study encourages meeting planners to exclude senior-level leadership if at all possible. “Avoid and resist senior managers and directors attending your meetings unless you can be sure that their presence will be positive, and certainly not intimidating. Senior people are often quick to criticize and pressurize without knowing the facts, which can damage team relationships, morale, motivation and trust.”
On December 19, 1732 Benjamin Franklin first published Poor Richard’s Almanack. This book was filled with proverbs and advice, and was so popular that it was continuously published for 25 years, selling an average of 10,000 copies per year.
Many of the proverbs and pieces of advice dealt with time, particularly time management. Some of the best known time proverbs from this book include:
Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Lost Time is never found again.
He that wastes idly a Groat’s worth of his Time per Day, one day with another, wastes the Privilege of using each Day.
If you have time, don’t wait for time.
Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.
Ah, simple Man! When a boy two precious jewels were given thee, Time, and good Advice; one thou hast lost, and the other thrown away.
Dost thou love Life? Then do not squander Time; for that’s the Stuff Life is made of.
TIME magazine was created in America in 1923 by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden. It was the first weekly news magazine in the US and its founders originally intended to call it Facts. However, because Luce and Briton wanted to keep their magazine brief (something that busy people could read in about an hour), they decided to change its name to Time and use the slogan “Take Time – It’s Brief.”
Largely thanks to its brief format, Time almost immediately surpassed its closest competitor, The Literary Digest. In fact, the magazine was so popular that in “History of Time Magazine” David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace wrote “if Time liked them, they marched or strode; if not, they shuffled, straggled, shambled, plodded, lumbered, barged, swaggered, wobbled, or slouched.”
These days, Time magazine is still the most popular weekly news magazine in the US, and has been since its creation, with the only exception of Newsweek, which briefly overtook Time during the Vietnam War.
Comments:
“As a telephony engineer, I feel for Nathan. Too many times in the office, I’m locked in and focusing on work and then someone comes with a drive-by question that totally breaks my concentration and flow. Some times it can take 10-15 minutes to get back in the groove of what you’re doing. Huge time waster.”
“”Do you have a second?” “Wait 5 minutes; in the middle of something.” Solves a lot of problems.”
“Perusing has two definitions in the dictionary that are contradictory in nature. Perusing also is defined as to skim in Meriam dictionary. Both meanings have been in use over 400 yrs.”
“That little interruption costs 30 minutes of context switching, but feels like 2 hours of stress. So in an 8 hour day, he will have to work 8.5 hours to finish the same work, but it will feel like 10 hours. It’s like slamming on the breaks in a car.”
“She is falling for him bc he doesn’t care.”