Time management makes the work superlative in quality

This Christmas eve ended up being a boring one for me. With the wife and daughter deciding to vacation in the peaceful surrounds of Grand Rapids, Michigan in the US, I was left to fend for myself. I decided to do what most people in this situation would do: Indulge in some retail therapy.

I went shopping and ended up at a Tommy Hilfiger store. There, a chance encounter provoked me into writing this piece. I was waiting my turn at the billing counter when two young girls walked up. One of them looked a bit depressed.

They placed two dresses on the counter. From their conversations, it was evident this was for a Christmas eve party the same evening. Christmas being what it is, it is of utmost importance to look your best and almost everyone ends up buying new clothes.

The girls began discussing alteration of the clothes with the store manager. The store manager politely told them that the earliest he could give the dresses back, was the day after Christmas.

The girls’ faces fell. They conferred with each other, shook their heads in disappointment, but paid an obscene amount and walked out with the dresses, promising to come back after Christmas for the alterations.

What’s the relevance of this story to life at work? There is a big connection. The girls were pretty and, in their new dresses, would have looked wonderful at the party. But did they come even close to what they could have? Probably not. And the only reason was that the expensive dresses were not a perfect fit. A little bit of time in hand could have changed this.

How many times in our work and life have we set out to do something only to realise that what we have done, is way short of our potential? Though we have the intelligence, capability and talent to do things, we end up doing them in a hurried, half-hearted and incomplete way.

When this happens, and we analyse the results, we realise that all the shabbiness in our work creeps in because we start late. If we have 10 days to finish a task, we begin on the ninth day and rush to meet the deadline. If a task takes five hours, we start only when there are four hours left. Like a visit to a dentist, we put off every job till it becomes inevitable to do it.

This leaves us no time to make sure that we have done it to the best of our ability — be it a presentation, a strategy plan, a customer request or even routine transactional stuff. And when we do it in the last minute, we do not get time to perfect it or even get feedback from others. It often ends up as a compromise.

Unlike the girls in the story, we can all look better at work if we start on time. There is another advantage, too. Starting early and finishing your work on time usually makes sure the work is superlative in quality, and adds to how people view you at your workplace.

Everyone needs to realise that if a job takes five hours, it will take that long irrespective of whether you do it on the first day or the last. If you take less time, it will affect the quality of work. Might as well do it on the first day so that you have enough time to take care of exigencies and surprises.

When you do things in a hurry, you make mistakes, which take longer to correct. To cap it all, you make the effort, do the work and don’t even get the benefit. Poor RoI, one might say.

Coming back to the two girls in the store, as they stepped out, I heard one of them say to the other: “Why couldn’t you have done this last week?” Isn’t that what many of us ask ourselves at work?