Time is Money.

New surveys have shown the seconds it takes you to read this sentence is longer than many people spend on a website, especially if it doesn't load immediately. Seems technology has shortened our tolerance to such an extent, that 4 seconds has become the bench mark for waiting on a site or app to load and if it doesn't load within that time, indications are, 25% of people move on. Move on to a competitor website, move on to another net distraction, move on to an email that has just lit up our in box or just grow frustrated with the lack of resolution sought. Immediacy has taken on a new meaning where expectations thought unimaginable previously are now standard and the future now seems seems just seconds and minutes away, not years.

This new level of tolerance, or intolerance, is having an effect on everything we do when it comes to waiting. The old adage of "if we don't serve you within a certain timeframe, it's free", made famous by McDonalds all those years ago, was a precursor to our instant demand and instant gratification society. The net can be blamed for a lot of things but who knew we would develop such onerous time expectations for our life directly attributable to how we surfed the web? No wonder the search for warp speed results is pushing the processor and app developers to provide solutions quicker and quicker.

Bench marks indicate, people are no longer patient enough to wait in line longer than 15 minutes, with 50% saying they will never go back to that establishment. Watch out if you get so successful you have a line up outside your establishment because the likelihood is, you will lose many of those clients regardless of how good your product is. For websites this has seen behemoths like Amazon calculate that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google, who make their money from advertising and speed have calculated that by slowing its search results by just four tenths of a second they could lose 8 million searches per day, meaning their capacity to advertise would be severely impacted. Time is money, has been pared down to the minutest detail where parts of a second now mean money.

Getting used to the speed of all the technology we carry around today is producing expectations that will eventually not be met and what will that do to the psyche of those that have always had that immediacy? It's good to know what a line was like, while waiting at the RTA, it's good to know that great food isn't made in a hurry and it's good to know that certain friends will always be late. Otherwise how else do we appreciate time savings made by technology advancement?

Yet if the bench mark on our expectations becomes measured in seconds, then our appreciation will surely wane for all the things worth waiting for, like love, a good pizza, the ice cream man on a hot Summer's day, the last chapter of a great book, the latest iPad and the next blog from me. Time is tight but it's not about money, it's about appreciation of what it can bring.