Who knows where the time goes?

You would think it would. In a single hour we can churn out 50 times the paperwork than we could produce in an entire day 20 years ago.

Somehow the time-savings disappears. What prevents us from maintaining our incredible potential pace?

I set out to identify where the time goes. I crisscrossed this great land, peering over people's shoulders on the job, sneaking and snooping to learn what was undercutting their output. And came up with some very interesting categories of waste. Here are just the top seven:

Compulsion. Take the games that come with Windows. Many top CEOs go around at night, deleting these games from employees' hard disks. It is not that they are great games. They aren't. But God help us, many are unable to quit a session of Windows Solitaire till we win that one game. And then we want to win a second to prove it wasn't a fluke.

Self-defense. The cyber regions have unfriendly skies. A newsgroup visitor makes the mistake of posting unbidden to a moderated room. That is a major no-no, and you will get fifteen distraught e-mail messages telling you what a sad lump of human flesh you are. You have no option except to reply forcefully to each, and the afternoon is soon shot.

Cosmetics. How often we find ourselves at the crucial moment when a document is ready to print, and we think, "I'll bet I could pretty that proposal up with a two-color border and a couple of daffodils." If we had had desktop publishing 50 years ago, we would still be at war.

Economy. The committed optimizer is on a ceaseless quest for shortcuts. Why settle for a three-click series of mouse clicks to open and close a file, taking four full seconds, when with a couple of hours of batch-file programming, you can create a keyboard macro that achieves the same feat in three seconds?

Interior decoration. Somewhere in your array of screen savers, wallpaper patterns, system fonts and color schemes, there is a combination that will overcome the weaknesses of your monitor, ease eyestrain forever, and enable you to work for 12 hours at a stretch. But first, you have to try out each of the 3.5 kajillion combinations.

Idleness. You wonder why advertisers ask for information about prospective customers on those inquiry cards in the back of PC Magazine. Is it likely that anyone with the authority to make a buy decision for an entire company is flipping languidly through the marketplace section of a 600-page magazine? I suppose it is.

And these six points are just the tip of the iceberg. Every moment we are not doing what the books say, and adding value to the customer, we are wasting time, and America's handhold on the merry-go-round ring of global competitiveness becomes that much more tenuous. Once gone, that moment can never be recalled.

TRANSCOMPETITION

A Business Week Book

Transcompetition: Moving Beyond Competition and Collaboration
by Harvey Robbins, Michael Finley
List: $24.95
Our Price: $17.47
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Hardcover, 240 pages
Published by McGraw-Hill
Publication date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0070530823

"A masterpiece of explanatory journalism!" - New Orleans Picayune "Fast, funny, and highly stimulating!" -Business Book Review Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover!