The little bits add up big

Posted by Doug on October 13, 2008

I’m not entirely sure why this is, but it seems that one of the facts of life that is lost on many people in our culture is the notion that small things can add up to big things over time.  Just the other day I bought a little pack of breath mints and noticed that the shape had changed slightly, reducing the amount of “mint material” in each mint just a little bit.  The price of the box was the same as before–I just paid the same amount for less product.  It might not seem like a big deal, but if the manufacturer saves two cents in the cost of materials in a box of mints and sells 10 million boxes at the same price, that’s $200,000 of increased profit.

A long time ago I heard a story about Leo Fender, the famed creator of Fender guitars, who was walking through the production shop one day and sifted through a pile of dust and dirt that had been swept up and found a couple of resistors in the pile that had fallen onto the floor.  At a penny or two each, it probably didn’t seem worth it to the worker to bend over and pick them up, but Leo did, and admonished the workers that those costs add up over time.

When something is small, you tend not to think of it as consequential, but the simple fact is that small things can add up to big things, faster than you might think.  If you can think in terms of the long haul when you consider costs, you’re going to make wiser choices about how you spend your money.

This principle applies not only to money, but time, as well.  Reduce the amount of time it takes you to do something that you do on a daily basis, and you’ve freed up 365 times that amount of time in a year. If I were able to find a route to my son’s school that took just 2.5 minutes less time, I would get about 30 hours back over the course of a school year.  If you’re reasonably proficient with your computer, chances are you can find ways to save time by automating or scripting certain repetitive, routine tasks, and use that time for other things that might do more to add to your bottom line.

Seth Godin wrote recently about effort, and challenged his readers to free up 120 minutes of each day by cutting out things like watching television, and use those 120 minutes for things like reading, learning something new, exercising, volunteering, etc.:

If you somehow pulled this off, then six months from now, you would be the fittest, best rested, most intelligent, best funded and motivated person in your office or your field. You would know how to do things other people don’t, you’d have a wider network and you’d be more focused.

That might be a bit of an overstatement, but not necessarily, and the point is well taken–a small change every day can add up to a really big change over time.  This is just the way things work–we see it in the world of investments, agriculture, manufacturing, and in our family (and business) budgets.

If you’re self-employed, working at home, you’re probably the one paying the closest attention to how you spend your time and money.  I would suggest you take a small investment of time and examine both areas of your work to see if there might be small changes you could make that could add up to something big over time.  Find one or two, and it will make your day.

So what small changes can you make?

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