In this competitive era of business and excellence, corporate world seems busy and everyone seems busier than ever before. Even with all the technology available to us, we just seem busier with more to do.
The reason we are getting too busy is it takes so long to do things the current way (which is no longer current, it’s 20 years old+). But we don’t have time to learn new yet proven tools or concepts, to step back and think about how we do things, and if there is a better way. We just keep on relentlessly pushing. Picture someone saying to an old generation phone user – but just use this smart phone, and they say ‘I’m too busy typing in text messages using 9 little buttons, I don’t have time to learn how to use that thing!’
That is the problem, and as long as this is going on, Change Management would be a burning issue for all the progressive organizations.
In today’s scenario even in the corporate world, executives strive to survive and are busy in fire fighting regularly, instead finding ways to improve. We are unable to identify the exact challenge because we are too busy. We are busy in our regular day-to-day routine work and so we don’t have time to identify the opportunities and to improve upon them. We don’t have time to make improvement part of our daily work.
Another reason we are busy, ‘cos we don’t have time to learn new tools and it is the biggest barrier to innovate.
The individual who acts the busiest may not be the most productive. Daily routines, improper prioritization or unfocused tasks ‘act like leeches’ on the efficiency – making unproductive busyness perhaps the most critical behavioral problem.
In the end, though it may sound counterintuitive, dedicating time to daily process improvement is the only way out of the trap of feeling like you have no time. The only way to free up time to do more important work is to begin to chip away at the sources of firefighting.
Contributed by: Raveena Rathi
Image courtesy: Hakan Fross