Uninterrupted Time in a Print Business

A print manufacturing business operates in the “now.” There are jobs that need to be processed in order to get on press, there are jobs that are on press, and there are jobs on the shipping dock that need to be shipped and then invoiced. The previous sentence is true every single day that your print business is open.

The priority of the “now” makes it very hard to dedicate time, effort, and brain power to making a better future. I just don’t see many people in a print manufacturing plant who get any discernible amount of uninterrupted time in their day. Most of the work I do absolutely requires uninterrupted time. When building software, you have to think through things on several levels. Often times I’ll have three different screens open because the feature I’m describing impacts so many parts of the software simultaneously. Even with uninterrupted time and the ability to see the connections across three screens, the user story I write will still go through three or four interations before it will get converted to software code.

Software is invading most print businesses. A lot of this software requires uninterrupted time to be able to properly learn it, configure it for your specific business, and strategize how to continue to optimize your workflows to work best with the software. Often times, when printers are struggling with software, the rarest thing to find is uninterrupted time of the key people required to make the software sing. It is frustrating to see qualified, smart people struggle only because they don’t have the opportunity to do a deep dive with the software that could result in greatly reducing the issues that cause all the interruptions in the first place.

As the print industry becomes more software-driven, more uninterrupted time is required of the people you count on to make your software tools work for you. This requires a cultural change for most printers. Because the business is in the “now,” a lot of the print culture revolves around interruptions. You have an issue, and you simply get up and start engaging with people to solve it. You don’t think through the fact that the people you’re interrupting might be dealing with their own high-priority issues. In this kind of culture, everyone is very busy looking (lots of activity) but not very effective (few results). 

The opposite can be true for a company that operates 100% remotely. I’ve been working remotely for many years now. I work from home, my whole team works from their homes, and about 90% of our interactions with our customer are remote. I hardly ever call someone unannounced. In fact, it doesn’t make sense to me at all because I assume everyone is busy on their own top priority items. I request meeting times in advance. Virtually every synchronous interaction is planned in advance. The assumption is that everyone is busy working on their top priorities and we should respect that by respecting their time. Interruptions only happen in cases of emergency (e.g. servers and/or software are down).

When we work remotely, we also have a much better on-time record for when we do meet. When I’m on-site at a customer, I notice that meetings don’t start on time; people show up while they are still on the phone, and often there are multiple conversations happening at the same time. When you’re remote and it's a conference call, it is very clear if you’re late: you’re wasting everyone’s time. The bigger the call, the more expensive the time you’re wasting. I wish we could publish real numbers of the costs of meetings starting late. If you have 10 people on a regularly occurring meeting and it always starts 5–7 minutes late, the annual cost to the company for the wasted time is worth evaluating. I had a boss once publish the cost of meetings on the invite. It makes you think about starting on time, finishing on time, and of course trying to figure out the breakdown of costs per attendee!

Respect for people’s time is lost when your business is an interrupt driven culture.

Leadership has to be part of this new need for uninterrupted time in a print business. It starts at the top. Your people need to be able to build in some parts of their day where they will not be constantly interrupted. You just cannot do some software tasks when you get interrupted every 20 minutes. It takes you a few minutes to get back into the task every time you’re interrupted. Not only will it make the task take thtee or four times longer than it should, it’s also extremely frustrating and can lead to less than optimal results.

We all have shared calendars nowadays; one of the best ways I’ve seen this work is that people actually block off some time on their calendar during which they intend to work on that thing that required uninterrupted attention. This only works if people are actually looking at your calendar to see if you’re available. If the interruptions are driven by in-person interactions, you will have to resort to a physical sign to indicate you’re working on something that would be better suited to an uninterrupted block of time. This goes back to a culture of respect for people’s time. There is definitely a time for collaboration and there is a definitely a time for people getting their own work done. Each of us has work we have to do collaboratively and work we can do independently. The key is to respect each other’s time so that we can both collaborate when needed and work uninterrupted when we need to get work done independently.