A Business Associate of mine (shall remain nameless but you know who you are) sent me a document this week for my thoughts and comments. He had already shared it with a third party and it included costings for a variety of chargeable services. On reading it I was interested to find a rather expensive item “at our cost”. “That’s very generous of you” I thought. Not sure I would have offered to pay for this particular service. So, being the helpful guy that I am, I queried it with him.
“Was there supposed to be a letter y in there?”
“Should it have read, at your cost?”
Sure enough there was a letter missing. It should have read “your” NOT “our”. That single missing letter had the potential to cost thousands of pounds if both parties had signed the document. Tiny error. Huge cost.
Y oh Y had this been missed?
Simply, because we are all busy. We are all trying to complete a number of tasks at once. We don’t always have the luxury of time and everything feels like it needs doing right now. I know that seems to be what my days feel like. I’m in the middle of doing something and then the phone rings or an e-mail arrives that I need to attend to immediately. Half finished tasks get put to one side and hopefully get my attention later in the day. This Blog is a perfect example. I started writing it three hours ago but the phone has been ringing and I’ve had ten other things to get done that were a priority.
What’s my point? Don’t sacrifice detail and accuracy just to get a task completed. That being said, there is a balance because when a client wants / needs something doing quickly then clearly that is a priority. Help a client and hopefully make a fee, or write a blog? The answer is pretty obvious and so this blog has been put to one side a few times this morning.
Learn to prioritise your work and be willing to tell someone if you can’t do something immediately. They will respect your honesty rather than you promising something and then letting them down.
Finally, beware that my good friend F7, spell check, is not intelligent, it doesn’t understand what I am typing (or why) so don’t rely on it to pick up your mistakes. Maybe in the future F7 will be more intelligent but until then it’s down to us to proof read what we send out. I hope that there are no mistaykees in this bloog.