“I would have written you a short note, but I didn’t have the time! (George Bernhard Shaw)”
How often do you find yourself saying “I don’t have the time right now”, or words to that effect? At work or home, every minute of every day, we all face decisions on how to spend the time we are given. Time is indeed precious, so why not spend just a little of it to consider how best to use the rest?
This was the decision we took at Outcider in 2013, when we decided to build our own software to monitor, analyse and report on media stories. Financially, it would have been easier to continue using third party systems, despite the time it took to generate client reports from the high volume of data and dashboards. Only after taking time out to consider how we worked in the present, to how we might work in the future with proprietary software, did we feel more comfortable with the risk.
Fast forward 8 years and we are weeks away from launching Version 3 of the media application, this time building stakeholder analysis into the process. Yet the fundamental objective of helping our clients to reduce the time they spend on tasks more suited to automation has never changed. To be clear, we subscribe to augmented intelligence, where technology is used appropriately to support analysis and decision making by humans. Like searching through big data to understand context, then extracting the comments and paragraphs that best summarise it. We do not offer a magic wand, but do believe our software helps individuals and teams to redeploy time to more creative or strategic thinking.
So next time someone asks you to step back and look at the world differently, take a moment and say “I do have the time”. The world has already changed.