The barber who takes his time closing

In a barber's shop in Amman, the last customer leaves and the barber does not switch off the lights. He cleans each blade, oils the clippers, winds every cable, folds the towels into one pile, and lays the combs out in the order his hand reaches for them. It takes him twenty minutes when he could be home in five.

The next morning the first customer sits down and his hands go to the right place without looking. No hunting for the guard, no knotted cable, no waiting.

The slowness at the end of the night is the speed at the start of the day.

Most small businesses do the opposite. They clear up fast and pay for it later. The photographs of last season's products are somewhere on a phone. The answer to the question customers ask most is typed out fresh each time. The supplier's number is buried in a conversation from two years ago. Whenever any of it is needed, the work starts again from nothing, in a hurry, at the exact moment there is no time for it.

People who are good at a trade run it the other way round. They spend time when it is cheap, at the end of the day when nobody is waiting, so they have it when it is expensive, when somebody is.

Putting things away properly is not a pause in the work. It is the next job, started early.