Time awareness
“Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.”
— Delmore Schwartz — American poet and short story writer 1913 -1966

I remember my time during boot camp in the Israeli Defense Forces. For reasons I could not understand at the time, every exercise we performed had a timekeeper assigned that would shout every 10 seconds how many seconds were left in that exercise. This went on for 12 weeks. Later, as I went through artillery school, I learned that not being time aware, even down to the second, can mean the difference between life and death through friendly fire.

Organizations that are not aware of time are bound to be out of sync. Moreover, time is a very precious resource. Time lost is lost forever.
In the Marine Corps, the saying goes, if you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late. If you’re late, you’re f…
Lack of Time Awareness creates friction. Not being on time is translated in loss of productivity and morale.
For me, being late is a form of stealing. If you make others wait for you, you rob them of time they’ll never get back. Time they could have used for the things important to them. Being punctual shows you value time yourself, and thus wouldn’t think of depriving others of this precious, but limited resource.
In Time Aware cultures, deadlines are met, and opponents are outmaneuvered through speed and synchronized agility. People respect each other’s time and are more productive on an individual and team level.
The first sign of a time-aware culture is clocks on the walls of all meeting rooms and workspaces. We have jumbo clocks in every workspace, sometimes more than one, so anybody can see them by just raising their head from any part of the room. All our clocks have Wireless Time Synchronization.

We equip every meeting room with a smart clock that is connected to the room calendar. These clocks are showing how much time is left in a meeting or how much time the room is free until the next meeting. They are also announcing when a meeting is starting and ending and when a meeting is 10 minutes away from starting or ending.

We place smart clocks on people’s desks that are connected to their calendar. Same as in meeting rooms, the clock will show time left until the next meeting and announce a meeting 10 minutes before it starts.

We have a TV in each meeting room with time zone clocks for all the locations where we have employees or key partners
We expect everybody to be on time for meetings. We prefer 25 minutes meetings and we make sure a meeting is never more than 50 min. We always start on time and end on time.
Meetings should be 30 minutes or less. If you know ahead of time that you only have 30 minutes to cover all of the topics on your list, you become hyper-aware of how you’re using that time. This translates into getting more done as you’ll be less likely to discuss things that are irrelevant. And, because you only have a small window of time, you also tend to listen better.
We make sure to say “adjourned” in loud voice when we consider a meeting has achieved its objective, even if we still have time left for the meeting.
When we schedule meetings, we make sure people are available. We also expect everybody to accept or decline.

Eric Kish as an author, speaker and practicing CEO. He is the author of 5 to 50 to 500: How to build and run scalable organizations and Everyday Turnaround: The art and science of daily business transformation

