Episode #267: Time When Doing Business In Japan

Time is life, time is money and time is your business. Business decisions are glacial here in Japan but buyer expectations of you regarding your response and follow times are exceedingly high. Tokyo especially bustles along. You see it in the mornings. I catch my subway train around 7.15am in the morning and to my astonishment I see people dressed for business, running through the subway station. Why are they running at 7.15am in the morning? Who knows, but it just reinforces that things are moving fast here in this crazy capital. The pace of life is fast so we have to be very well organised to keep up with buyer’s expectations.

It is so much harder to be well organised today. Emails are hitting our inboxes like a tsunami, just wave upon wave of new emails, without remorse and without relent. You cannot call any one anymore either because they are in meetings, everyone is in meetings. You know your email will get drowned in their inbox and you cannot get them on the phone, so making contact with people in business is so much harder. I thought all these cool tech thingees we have today would make business easier but that is not necessarily the case on all aspects. Our windows to people are getting more narrow and our time openings more compressed. So we have to become like demons on speed when it comes to better organizing ourselves.

One important aspect of that is planning our day. Now for some people reading this they may be thinking, “forget that, I am a free spirit, I am going to do it my way. I don’t want to be bound by rules and schedules. I need the muse to come out and I want to run my business that way”. I very much doubt you are operating at maximum performance this way and the cold hard reality is we have to plan our days extremely efficiently, because we are all so time poor. Other people may be thinking, “yeah, yeah, I know all that, I know I have to prioritse my day”. It reminds me of my 17 year old son, who whenever I tell him to do something says “yeah, yeah Dad, I know” but then doesn't do it. We all know what we should be doing but it doesn’t mean we actually get around to doing it.

What should we be doing? We should be seeing our time management in holistic, whole of life terms. There is no point just planning for business because your life is multifaceted and there are many areas apart from work which need attention. We play more than just a business role in our lives. I am a husband, a father, a colleague, a leader, a salesman, a writer, an investor, perpetual student, a friend, etc.

Every one of these roles had priorities which must not be sacrificed just for the business component. We need to work out what our respective roles are and plan our goals and priorities for each of these roles. That old saw about “nobody on their deathbed wished they had spent more time down at the office” is true. The way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to make sure you have specified goals organized in priority order for all aspects of your life. When it comes to daily planning, we draw on these and make sure that all priorities both business and otherwise are covered off. The classic is you are too busy working in your business to get your taxes done in time or get your expenses claims completed.

This is when you know that you have a failed time management system in place.

Start with your goals and review the priorities you have set and then see if any of these need to be injected into today’s schedule? That will capture both business and non-business objectives. Calling your aged parents every week should be in there. Spending time to watch your kids play sports should be in there. Reading about investment information should be in there. Getting your tax submission documentation should be in there, especially in Japan, as they don’t allow late submissions or extensions. The point is your life is multi-faceted and so should your goals and priorities be in your scheduling. This then gets boiled down to a daily “to do” list in order of greatest import. Which one of these many things is the most urgent or will have the greatest impact? Start with that one.

This is key you have to start with the highest priority order and stick with that one unless something happens and you have to rearrange the order. Here is the key – you cannot do everything, but you can get the most important thing done everyday. If you can do that you will be so far ahead of everyone else it will be ridiculous. I sometimes fail in this regard and I lack the discipline to do things in the order of highest priority. I don't think I said I was a saint? Anyway, the key is to try. I know myself that the days I do manage it, are so vastly more efficient than the days I don’t, the evidence is overwhelming for being better organised around goals and priorities and the discipline to compete tasks in order.

Another good idea is to organize project work into block time. This means that time is set aside to work on a project without interruption. We make appointments with our clients and we defend that time allocation. We need to do the same for ourselves so that we can get to work on items that need time or deep thinking or both.