Time Can Work For and Against You

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One thing we all take advantage of is time and how much of it exists. Later – that persistent future presence — always remains available even when it never arrives. It can be both advantageous and disadvantageous (depending on what’s being put off), but when it’s bad, it’s oh, so bad.

When it’s advantageous, later is a convenient and necessary delay tool that prevents unexpected problems. It gives us a bit of wiggle-room to address other pressing issues, gather required tools, or ensure something will ‘work’ before it’s broadcast to the world wide public.

A Good Read: Respect: Gaining It and Sustaining It

When it’s disadvantageous, later is a ticking-time bomb that creates a triple ripple-effect upon explosion. When you want to pay your web hosting service later, for example, but that hosting service says, “Nuh-uh, not again,” BOOM! There goes your website, your visitors, and your online sales. When you want to pay that business phone bill later, but Ma Bell pulls the plug anyway,” BOOM! There goes your customer connection, your fax-on-demand service, and your pay-by-phone options.

An Unintended Consequence

There’s another effect that later influences, and it’s an effect that many of us don’t regard. That effect is a loss of respect – a loss that covers all boundaries no matter what you procrastinate, even in outsourcing.

Consider the service provider who, for weeks at a time, disappears during mid-contract only to reemerge a month and a half later with little more than an apology.  Think about how that provider’s absence would disrupt your work schedule and have you scrambling to find an adequate replacement. Aside from being outright unprofessional, it’s disrespectful of your valuable time.

Any sensible outsourcer would pull the plug on that contract right away and “Nuh-uh, not again” all the way to a more responsible contractor.

Wouldn’t you?

Of Course, You Would!

Now try reversing roles for a moment, where you’re the service provider, and your virtual employer disappears on you. Think about how that absence would disrupt your work schedule and have you scrambling to replace the lost income. Vanishing acts aren’t acceptable either way you look at it.

Intentions to get back to your service provider later may not disrupt your web hosting or business line, but it can disrupt whatever amount of respect you managed to gain as a serious and professional client. It can disrupt that respect so much, in fact, getting it back and maintaining a contracted relationship could be next to impossible. Successful outsourcing runs on a two-way street, where both parties recognize the value of each other’s time, and then treat that time as valuable as they treat their own.

So don’t make the mistake of assuming otherwise and thinking you can continue working past respect-o’clock. Because by then, it’s way too late.

That. Contract. Is. Null. And. Dead.