The Cost of Deciding

To increase your efficiency and reduce your cost, you should use your computers to reduce the cost of deciding.

If I were to say to you, “Decisions can be costly”, I suspect you would agree. Probably, what you would be agreeing to is that decisions have serious consequences, and sometimes those consequences are bad and end up costing us lots of money. That truth is undeniable, but it is not the thrust of this article.

This article addresses the fact that “deciding” takes time, and if deciding is not done quickly and efficiently, then it can be costly to your business. Perhaps you have never really considered the time taken by you and your employees to make decisions, but I hope you will after reading this article.

People often think about their day primary in terms of the actions that must be completed. How often have you thought to yourself, “I have so much to do today.” Imagine the set of green bars below as the list of actions you must complete today:

Now, the first bar might be “Prepare estimate for Mrs. Smith”, the second bar might be “Remind Mr. Jones about appointment”, etc. These are the things you need to do today.

In actual practice, we don’t normally proceed directly from one task to the next. Instead, we typically have decisions between one action and the next. In the illustration below, the grey bars represent decisions we must make between our actual actions

When we first arrive in the morning , we must initially decide on our first task. Once that is completed, we must decide on which tasks come next, and so on. Those periods of ‘deciding’ can actually be significant if you were to add them up. If you don’t believe me, go sit beside one of your employees with a stopwatch and count the cumulative time spent in the gap between the actual completion of events. I suspect you would be surprised.

In the business of countertop fabrication, employees tend to need to take one action for one customer, then jump to another action for another customer. The total number of actions your employees must complete each day can be large, perhaps 100 or more. If your employees spend even one minute deciding what to do next after the completion of a task, that could be 100 minutes just deciding what to do.

As if that weren’t enough, the phones are ringing and your employees are being interrupted. Once interrupted, the employee must first deal with the interruption and then go back to the task they were working on prior to the interruption. That return to their previous task can also take time, trying to figure out what they were doing and what they had already completed.

Good software can help you and your employees quickly decide what comes next. Look for software that includes a quick and user-friendly way for your employees to organize their tasks for the day and to determine what happens next.

Perhaps you won’t bother taking the time to actually use a stopwatch and determine how much time your employees are spending ‘deciding’ things. This issue has probably never been at the top of your list of issues to address. However, a tank with many small leaks can lose just as much water as a tank with one large leak. I suspect you have the opportunity for significant increases in efficiency and corresponding decreases in cost by reducing the time spent on ‘deciding’ at your office.

The Cost of Deciding

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