My daily ritual...

Tw --- thanks for the joke. Personally, I subscribe the the Woody Allen technique when it comes to exercise. It works like this: Every time I get the urge to exercise, I lay down until it goes away! : )

Not.

Anyway, currently I have a crew of three full time guys in my sheet metal business. They are all very productive workers. But prior to this crew, I had just two guys, one who out-produced the other by a long shot. I analyzed why, and here's what I discovered: It's very simple. The more productive guy was always working when he is at a job site, except when taking a break for lunch. When he arrived, he would set up, look over what needed to be done and begin doing it. The less productive guy would arrive at the job site, look things over . . . then look them over some more . . . then set up .. . . and look it over again, then start working. By now, the more productive guy has been producing for anywhere from 15 minutes to a half hour. Being a smoker, after a while the less productive guy would light up and, while pretending to be still working ("helping" the more productive guy), watch the more productive guy as HE was working. End result: the non-productive guy no longer has a job, and the productive guy is making 50% more than he was while working with the non-productive guy.

Procrastinate, procrastinate, procastinate = non-production/lost production.

Look at this: If you waste 15 minutes out of your production time, over a year's time (figuring an 8 hour work day, 5 day work week, 50 weeks a year), you have wasted 65.5 hours. That's a little over a week and a half of production time wasted!

Let's ramp it up. Suppose you fritter away an hour of production time a day. Under the same parameters (40 hour work week, 50 weeks worked per year), you wind up wasting 250 hours over the year. That's the equivalent of NOT WORKING 40 hours a week 6.25 weeks! In other words, your 1 hour of wasted production time per day cost you about a month and a half of production in a year's time!

Back to the productive/non-productive guys comparison. I figured that my productive guy was doing two to three MONTHS more work per year than my less-productive guy. As an employer, who do you think I would rather reward with higher wages? Who would I rather fire? No brainer!

Take a look at it: How much productive time do you waste a day? Two hours? That's like sitting on your *ss, 40 hours a week, week after week, for about three months! Could you confront the idea of sitting around doing nothing for 40 hours a week for three months, while claiming that you are working, and taking a paycheck for that "work"? Well, if you waste 2 hours of production time a day, that's the same thing!

Anyone thinking "government workers"?

Not claiming to be a saint here. I'm not. I waste way too much time. I'm just trying to put things into perspective. Perhaps someone may wonder why their income is not up in the range they want. Check your production. How much production time do you figure you waste in a day? How many WEEKS or MONTHS of production are you throwing away every year?

Food for thought!

---- Hugh