Being on time is one of the biggest issues people struggle with every day in both their professional and personal lives. After decades of talking about the subject, and book after book encouraging professionals to develop time management skills, there are still plenty of empty seats around conference room tables (virtual or in-house) across the country every day.

Why? Because someone is running late. And they are running late because they have developed inadequate time management, something that is key to quality management.

Lean Six Sigma may have the answers to change that reality. By using the tools and techniques available in methodologies, people can identify the root causes behind their constant lateness, from procrastination to attempting to juggle too many tasks at once. Or, worse, both of them simultaneously.

Why Time Management Is a Big Deal

Children can be late because they’re children. Popular musical acts can take the stage an hour behind schedule because they’re stars. Some celebrities and politicians even make lateness part of their brand. And sometimes, delayed planes, trains and (Uber) automobiles may cause lateness. But for most people in most situations, in settings both professional and personal, time management is a big deal because being late is a bad habit.

Lateness doesn’t just impact the late person, who frequently ends up running down the street or taking the stairs rather than waiting for the elevator. It also impacts the people waiting for them, whether it’s friends at a dinner party or directors at a board meeting. In either case, it’s better to be on time (or even a little early).

Being late is disrespectful of other people’s time and can make them feel unimportant or undervalued. In business, it’s considered unprofessional to be consistently late. Chronic tardiness eventually will impact a person’s reputation in the workforce and may erode others’ belief in the person’s reliability and trustworthiness. It can also cause delays in meetings and disrupt the schedules of others.

People who are late often may miss out on important information. They almost certainly will cause themselves unnecessary stress, trying to make it to their destination at the last minute.

Time management is also key to getting work done on time. People who don’t know when to stop one part of work and move onto the next will find themselves often running behind. That can lead to missed deadlines that impact a project’s completion and the schedules of co-workers.

Can Lean Six Sigma Help a Person Stop Being Late?

People can apply the methodologies of Lean Six Sigma to help them stop the habit of being late, whether it’s to make meetings or to meet deadlines. It’s one of the ways people can apply the methodologies to their work and their everyday lives.

Several Lean Six Sigma tools lend themselves to this. The tasks associated with Value Stream Mapping, which typically identifies each task in a process and determines its value for the end user, can be altered to, for example, assess every task done in the morning by a person who is always late for work (or anything else),

By carefully writing down in detail every task undertaken from waking up in the morning to leaving for the office, a person can find the steps they take each morning that add time but not value to their morning. Maybe they take out the garbage when they could have done it the night before. Or maybe they spend too long watching the news on TV or reading it online. Whatever the case, by carefully mapping out a morning, it’s easier to find areas of waste.

The Five Whys also give people a chance to ask a series of questions that drill down to the root cause of a problem. That makes it possible to develop a plan to eliminate them. In the case of time management, it sometimes comes down to making a few simple changes in habits each day.

The DMAIC process in Six Sigma also offers a way to uncover the real problems that undermine time management and put solutions in place.

  • Define: Identify the problem and set clear goals for improvement. For example, a person may define their problem as being consistently late to meetings, and set a goal of arriving on time or five minutes early.
  • Measure: Collect data to better understand the current state of lateness. This may involve tracking exactly what happens in the hours before meetings for several weeks.
  • Analyze: Identify root causes through statistical analysis of what happens before meetings. For example, someone may spend too much time trying to get a report done before the meeting, when it could get done afterward.
  • Improve: Develop and implement solutions to address the root cause.
  • Control: Monitor progress and make adjustments as needed to ensure the improvements in time management are sustained.

Time management isn’t easy with busy professional and personal lives. However, it can be accomplished by committing to learning Lean Six Sigma tools and putting them into action. It’s a good habit that can help you get rid of a bad one.