Opportunity Cost
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were talking about opportunity cost. He explains it as weighing what you are doing against what you are not able to do because of what you are doing. For example, if you’re sitting in a meeting for an hour, maybe you’re giving up an hour you could use to finish a long-term project. Lately the duties of my job have been expanding quite a bit, so I’ve been thinking about opportunity cost a lot. What am I missing out on and what is the office missing out on because I am not able to do all of the tasks they expect me to do? As I take on more duties, I have to give up others. Is it better for me to work on some of the new assignments coming my way or give them up to renew work on a stalled project?
Here’s a concrete example: Part of my job is to answer inquiries from the public. Many of the telephone inquiries get screened before they come to me. The person screening the calls, theoretically, should redirect calls to the most appropriate office, which often is not my office. Sometimes, the person sends a call my way that isn’t appropriate for me. It took me about 30 minutes to redirect one of these misdirected calls to the appropriate office a few weeks ago because I needed to explain to the woman why I couldn’t assist her and, since there isn’t a single office on campus that could handle her inquiry, help her navigate the system so she could figure out where to go next. (Maybe I’m too nice when it comes to helping people. I could have ended the call much quicker by simply acknowledging I couldn’t help her, hanging up, and leaving her bewildered.) That’s 30 minutes I was not able to spend working on an article on deadline, an urgent Web page update, and deadline research. It’s also 30 minutes she wasted because she didn’t get directed to the proper place to begin with.
Now that I’m thinking about tasks in terms of opportunity cost, time seems to be even more limited and have more value. I’m getting a better handle on why so many people spend so much time working on time management. In some situations, I’m better able to set priorities. In others, I just feel more frustrated because of what I’m not able to do that needs to be done.
June 4th, 2004 at 2:01 pm
We all try to plan our days so as to fill our hours doing what we think and know needs to be done. Unexpected intrusions shred and foil our plans. It can be extremely frustrating. At the Boston Herald we have instituted a simple voice mail box for outside calls (for a more thorough explanation, see the NLN article at http://www.ibiblio.org/slanews/nln/nln99/spring/pubserve.htm). Most of our externally-generated incoming calls go there and we are able to deal with them quickly but ACCORDING TO OUR SCHEDULE. Many outside calls STILL get through, especially the really important ones. Still, this helps us to protect our priorities and work schedule. While one can’t eliminate opportunity costs, one can mitigate them. I think, too, that many outside callers are happy to get an answer to their query that has been carefully considered rather than dealing with a stressed-out librarian trying to come up with an answer off of the top of their head while cataloging photographs.