_Products add value only 0.05–5% of the time they spend in your system. The rest is waiting._ --- A project sits in review for a week. The actual review takes forty minutes. A customer order waits in a queue for three days. Processing takes an hour. A feature request enters the backlog and emerges six months later. Development took two weeks. This pattern repeats everywhere. Products and services add value somewhere between 0.05% and 5% of the time they spend in your system. The rest is waiting — for batches to complete, for rework, for decisions. Most organisations treat time passively. It's just how long things take. But time is a strategic variable you can manipulate with the same rigour you apply to cost reduction. Firms that compress cycle times grow roughly three times faster than competitors and earn roughly twice the profit. ## Where Time Disappears Waiting has three components: **Waiting for batches.** Work piles up until there's enough to process efficiently. The efficiency is real but the delay compounds. Small batches, processed more frequently, collapse this time. **Waiting for rework.** Errors caught late require correction. The work loops back, consuming more time than doing it right originally. First-time-right quality isn't a moral virtue — it's a time strategy. **Waiting for decisions.** Work stalls while someone with authority reviews it. Every approval layer adds delay. Decision rights pushed closer to the work collapse this bottleneck. Most operating problems appear downstream but originate upstream. The error that causes rework was designed in. The bottleneck that creates batching reflects an organisational choice. Time-based companies fix upstream, not downstream. ## The Customer Insight The most attractive customers are those who cannot wait. They'll pay premiums for responsiveness. The least attractive are those who will wait — because the price they'll pay is low. This inverts conventional thinking. Most companies see impatient customers as demanding and difficult. Time-based competitors embrace them. They let rivals fight over patient customers whilst they own the segment that pays for speed. Variety reinforces this. After you cut price, customers have nothing left to look for. But expanding choice makes you increasingly relevant. Time compression lets you offer variety profitably because you've eliminated the waste that makes variety expensive. ## The Discipline Look at any process that touches customers. Map how much time the work spends actually adding value versus waiting. If value-adding time is less than 5% — and it almost always is — you've found leverage. The questions that unlock this aren't about working harder. They're structural: What batch sizes could shrink? What decisions could move closer to the work? What rework loops could disappear with better upstream design? Speed isn't about pressure. It's about removing the 95% of time that's pure waste. --- **Related:** [[Notes/Stop Starting Start Finishing|Stop Starting, Start Finishing]] · [[Notes/Hidden Bottleneck|Hidden Bottleneck]] **See also:** [[Book Summaries/Competing Against Time|Competing Against Time]]