About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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NEWS, ARTICLES & UPDATES
Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
Eliminating Wasted Time
I would say that Google has provided a tool that helps eliminate the waste of time spent filing things so you can find them later. Gmail works great and so does Google desktop (and web search for that matter). Searching for things is much better than trying to find things in outlook file folders...
It isn't really 5s (I don't think) but the best solution I have found is let Google find it for me. For some material this doesn't work well, but for the best way to manage personal electronic data I think right now Google is good.