Time is one commodity that is equally scarce for everyone. Nobody has found a way to create more of it, nor to affect its passage. Since it is so precious, it makes sense that we should waste as little of it as possible. We all waste time occasionally, but it is important to identify things that cause us to waste our time and change our behavior (or the behavior of others) to eliminate persistent time-wasting activity.

Sometimes our trading partners cause us to waste time. I recently encountered a third-party claims administrator who tried to speed up the processing of peer medical reviews of claims that were pending denial for lack of medical necessity. The claims staff asked their medical consultants if they could transmit the claims to them by e-mail and receive the reviews back in the same manner. Believe it or not, most of the consultants asked to continue receiving faxes, because they didn't use e-mail. This happened in January, not years ago.

Another example of time-wasting affected our agency directly. When policies issued by one of our carriers are reinstated after a pending cancellation for nonpayment of premium, the carrier sends us the reinstatement notices as single-page PDF documents. We receive as many as 10 of these items a week, attached to separate e-mails. Each e-mail has to be opened and routed to the appropriate CSR. The CSR then has to open the e-mail and attachment and make a notation in the client's electronic file. This task could be accomplished more efficiently if the reinstatement notice were sent in a form that could be directly attached to a client's file. Though the carrier eliminated paper, its workflow has not improved. In fact, processing this transaction takes more time than it did back in our "paper" days.