It was 15 minutes before we were leaving for school and he still wasn't ready to go. He just seemed to be pacing back and forth throughout the house.
"Kyle, dude," I said, "You've got to get ready for school."
"But Dad I can't find my Chapstick" (actually we don't use the Chapstick brand but that's what we all call it anyways).
"Kyle you've been up for 45 minutes now. What have you been doing?"
"Looking for my chapstick." He said.
"Where did you leave it?" I asked.
"Dad if I knew that it wouldn't be lost."
Dang, I thought. When did he get that smart? It was true, however.
"Well, where do you usually leave it? Don't you have place for it? Kind of like I have a place for my keys." I replied.
"No. Not really." He answered.
"Ohhhh… I feel a Blog Post coming on", I thought to myself.
Did you know that businesses are not unlike my son Kyle. They place things somewhere only to spend inordinate amounts of time looking for them later.
The average employee spends 2 hours per week, for example, looking for documents they have saved on their own desktops or computers.
Do the math. Let's say you have 10 employees averaging $15.00 per hour. That's $300.00 per week in lost productivity. That adds up to over $15,000 dollars per year.
So here is a system that you can create in less than an hour that will be potentially worth $15,000 or more to you and your business.
Figure out how you would like your documents stored on your computers. Don't just say put them on the Z: drive. Create your foldering system. Perhaps by position in the company or by business function. Either way determining your document storage protocol can take little time and dramatically increase your employee productivity.
Kyle has yet to find his Chapstick. Guess we will have to work on a system for that too.