“I never thought of it that way,” said Eduardo.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Trying to attach Time Span to specific tasks in a person’s job,” he explained.

“What do you think about it?”

“I never really thought about the person’s whole job. When I start to attach Time Span to the separate tasks in a job, my understanding of the job gets a lot larger.”

“Give me an example,” I prompted.

“Okay, one of my supervisors, Julie, is responsible for scheduling. On the face of it, she needs to sit down and write out the schedule once a week. It takes 45 minutes to an hour depending on the work we have in house. If the schedule gets messed up, you know, someone gets sick, or the volume of work increases, Julie throws up her hands. She is quick to blame the circumstance and says she did her job, she put the schedule together last Friday.”

I smiled as Eduardo continued.

“So, scheduling is not something with a Time Span of one hour. Scheduling has a Time Span of three weeks. That’s how far in advance that we schedule.

“When I explain it to Julie, we need to talk about the Time Span. We publish the schedule each Friday, but she needs to be planning, for real, three weeks into the future. She needs to check the incoming work mix, scheduled machine maintenance and vacation schedules for the upcoming three weeks. Materials, machines and people for the upcoming three weeks.

“And when there is a change in the schedule, she needs to recalculate everything, three weeks into the future. By attaching Time Span to the task, now, I can see the whole job.”