A couple of weeks ago I talked about gaining 20 minutes a day and how this adds up to 2 weeks in a year. How do we arrive at gaining 20 minutes, does it apply to everyone?
You gain time by saving time on activities you have to do, in our case how you manage keys.
Let's use a simple numbers approach first. If you issue 10 keys a day you will repeat the following activities.
Key Sign Out
- Look up the address of the property and identify the key to sign out.
- Fetch the key.
- Handover the key and sign it out.
Key Sign In
- Receive the key
- Sign in the key
- Hang it up in its designated location
To issue 10 keys a day you will on average undertake 20 activities, 10 sign outs and 10 sign ins. If you save an average of 1 minute on each activity you will save 20 minutes a day. I agree this is a simplification and is only part of the story.
Does this apply to everyone? That depends on your current system, but we think this is a minimum, particularly if you use a paper log book system or a spreadsheet. Some of our customers tell us they save an hour a day (over £200/month).
What is the potential for you?
When you have a few minutes take look at one or more of these:
- Observe your office in action during the day
- Write down your process
- Time yourself and your colleagues
- What happens if you are interrupted?
- How often are your records incomplete?
- Do people "shortcut" the system?
How long does it really take to manage your keys?