I Don’t Have Time for That

The world we live in is evolving faster than ever, and, consequently, almost everything in it–people, tech, nature, economics–are changing faster than ever. One thing I don’t see changing though, is the human tendency to overlook the obvious in trying to keep up with it all. 🙋🏽‍♀️

Time and time again, we find the solutions to the issues we encounter in the ever-growing pile of things we “don’t have time for.”

Luckily, as the world is moving faster than ever, the opportunity costs we incur for not making time for things in the pile are also surfacing faster. And because of that time gap closing, we’re now able to better connect the dots between what we don’t make time for and the problems that result. 

Before this recent AI craze, I thought of technology as something that helps us do something more/faster/better/easier. Now that AI is here, I see that–somewhere in the future–the doing of many things will be done for us by technology. And if most of the doing is done, then knowing becomes the priority for all of us.

Knowing what’s possible and what isn’t. Knowing what’s probable and what isn’t. Knowing what we know, and what we don’t know. 

Every business carries an ongoing list of pain points and issues, but how many items on those lists already have solutions screaming for our attention?

Recently, Greg was troubleshooting an issue with one of our software applications when he found a feature that will literally shave hours off my workload each month.

How did we overlook this? Why didn’t we think to look for it?

We didn’t know. 

But we could have, if we weren’t “too busy” to read the weekly emails from that software company–like we tell all of our clients to do. 🤦🏽‍♀️

The point I’m trying to make is that, as difficult as business ownership can be–especially with as fast as the world is moving–it seems that much of the difficulty comes from what we don’t know. 

Whether it’s the software we use to run our operations or the markets we serve and operate in, when things get difficult for us, we need to take it as a sign that we’re missing something–that there’s something we don’t know.

And the best place to find that missing something is in that pile of things you don’t have time for.