Seventeen years ago when my consulting career began, I also began flying much more – just about every week, in fact.
As I got used to the new daily rhythms of airports, rental cars, and hotels, I started experiencing the amount of time spent standing in line from a new perspective.
The time it took to get through airport security, for example, became a recurring concern as opposed to an episodic one. I began to care far less about how long I was waiting in security lines for any one flight, and I began to care far more about all the time added up I was waiting in security lines for all my flights.
Here’s an simple illustration: Let’s say I go through airport security check-points 100 times during a year – which I have done multiple years. If the average security line wait is 20 minutes per screening, that equals over 33 hours of waiting in security lines per year – almost a full work week!
When the Transportation Security Administration began the roll out of the TSA PreCheck program in 2013, I remember wondering if the fee of $85 was worth it. In general, I wasn’t seeing a huge difference in wait times between the TSA PreCheck lines and the “normal” lines. I wondered if the $85 was worth saving 5 minutes or so waiting in line on average.
But the accumulated impacts of even small reductions are significant. Saving just 5 minutes on average each time I went through airport security meant that I’d be collectively waiting in screening lines for 25 hours per year. Still, a seriously long time, but not the 33+ hours I was waiting without TSA PreCheck.
By taking the time to set up and pay for TSA PreCheck, I would save over 8 hours – a full work day – each year. What could I do with an additional full work day each year?
The $85 cost started to sound like a fantastic deal now – especially when I considered that TSA PreCheck is good for 5 years.
So, the question today is simple: What task or project or chore are you going to do today, because it is “just easier (or cheaper) to do myself,” that actually is costing you far more in the long run?
It’s easy to question whether saving 5 minutes is worth $85. But when we take into account our accumulated time, the costs of that “easier to do it myself” task might be far more significant than we imagine.
