Welcome to the Tech Execs, where we discuss new and emergent technologies to help executives manage their organizations. In this episode, we discuss the biggest wastes of time in technical initiatives for organizations. We talk about what is so damaging about these issues in organizations and what can be done to prevent these.

Book Mentioned in the Episode: The Effective Executive

Eric’s Two Time Wasters

• Meetings
  • Problem: People spend too much time on meetings, allowing their best people to waste hours of their time on pointless meeting activities.
  • Solution: Mandate that meetings must be accompanied by preparation of all attendees, especially the host. The host should post and agenda and clearly state what the goal of the meeting is. And just because a meeting is scheduled for a certain length of time doesn’t mean it needs to be filled if you’ve already accomplished your purpose 🙂
• Email is treated like a chat tool
  • Problem: People use email as an IM tool, expecting an immediate response to their problems as opposed to sending and email and letting people get back to them at their own pace.
  • Solution: Encourage employees to establish a schedule for checking and responding to email. Don’t expect immediate response to email. If you need an immediate response, call or go talk to the person instead. It’s important to model the type of behavior you want to see out of your employees.

Brian’s Time Waster

• Indecision on Two Similar Technology Stacks
  • Problem: When picking a new technical initiative, organizations will get stuck at the final mile, choosing between two acceptable alternatives. This indecision wastes the time of the organization by not allowing action to be taken to implement these solutions.

Overarching Problem: No Culture of Discipline

Executives have the ability to promote a culture of discipline by setting the rules on what is an acceptable use of time versus not. Most of these problems are issues of indecision. A strong executive could easily solve each of these problems with the right culture.

If you would like us to discuss a topic on The Tech Execs or have a question for us, please send an email to us at answers@thetechexecs.com. We want to hear the tech management problems you are experiencing and give you guidance on how to solve those problem.