Commentary

Not Enough Hours In the Day......

According to some imaginative soul at the Department of Labor, Americans work 40 hours a week. Everybody I know puts in at least 60 and that doesn’t count the time at home logged back into work-related e-mail or reading the Harvard Business Review.

As I was resolving on New Year’s Eve to lose weight, work out more, drink less, and stop making resolutions I can’t keep, I was thinking about how to spend my work hours more productively. The first step was to list just HOW I am spending each of those 12 daily hours and see where I could make adjustments:

1 hour: Reading online news/industry-related sites like Old-timers, MediaPost, MediaLife, I Want Media, ClickZ, etc. unless my name is mentioned, then 2.3 hours.

2 hours: sorting through about 3,000 daily e-mails. After deleting offers for more sex, less weight, lower loans and my share of Nigerian Petroleum money, .25 hours.

3 hours: on the phone, saying NO to CPA deals, arguing that buying MSN, Yahoo and AOL is not in fact “buying the Internet;” giving case studies of advertisers who have successfully advertised on Winstar Interactive sites; introducing myself to 26 year old media buyers who can spend $2 billion on network TV in three days, but want to argue with me for six weeks about spending $250,000 on the Internet.

1 hour: Gym…or Ralph’s House of Ribs. It’s never an easy decision.

1.5 hours: online researching old football half time speeches to use at next sales meeting, gloating in NY Giants fan chat rooms about outcome of 49er’s game, hiding bonus money in “office supplies” in expense account so that top sales people get just compensation, grading student papers from class I teach at local university – giving D to student who leaves Internet out of media schedule in ad buying model.

.000001 hour: checking online portfolio making certain red hasn’t yet changed to green. It hasn’t. Ponder what to do with 5,000 shares of DoubleClick, Broadcom and Cisco bought in the $60 per range. Consider how shares might work as garden mulch.

1.5 hours: Client lunch. Bizou waiter asks that I stop sobbing in front of other patrons.

1.5 hours: Work on agency PowerPoint presentation. Collect OPA studies on effectiveness of online advertising; pull God-like images from photo disc to illustrate quotes from Dave Smith; Jim Meskauskas and Tim McHale; consider adding son’s tuition invoice to final panel.

.05 hour: Prayer. Rationalize that if Higher Power can give life, make sunsets, produce Spring every year and show Garcia how to score four times in 15 minutes, it is OK to ask for $50 CPMs.

John Durham is COO of Interep Interactive. He may be reached at jdurham@wims.com

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