Five questions to find your own time sinks

When I ask in a conversation how long something takes, I almost always get a number. And it is almost always too small.

That is no reproach, I was the same. Had somebody asked me how much time shift planning cost me, I would have said „a good hour a week“ and honestly believed it. The hour for the plan was in the calendar. The Friday evenings were written down nowhere.

That is why every audit starts with counting rather than with tools. And it is why the most common mistake around saving time is that somebody reads about a program, tries it, and after three weeks nobody uses it any more. Nobody had worked out beforehand whether that was even the expensive spot.

How do I find the time sinks in my office?

For every recurring task, note four things, how often, how long, who does it, with what. Frequency times duration gives the hours per week. Sort by that number, not by annoyance. The biggest item is almost never the one you get most worked up about.

Four notes per task

Take a sheet of paper. For every task that comes to mind, note four things. No more, or you will not fill it in.

1. How often?

   Per week or per month. Not „all the time“.

2. How long?

   Per run, honestly, not at its best.

3. Who does it?

   You yourself or somebody else?

4. With what?

   Paper, a spreadsheet, a program, in your head?

Frequency times duration gives hours per week. That is the only number that counts. Only once it is written down can you see what is big and what merely feels big.

The five questions

If you cannot think which tasks to write down at all, these five help. They are the same ones I ask in a call.

• Tell me about your Monday. When do you start, what is the first thing you touch?
• When are you at your desk, in the morning or in the evening? What happens in the evening is almost always what was left over during the day.
• What has been lying on your desk for a week? Work that gets pushed back is usually unpleasant work, and unpleasant often means laborious and recurring.
• What do you do regularly that somebody else could do? And why does nobody else do it?
• What happens if the person who does that is off for three weeks? If the answer is „then it stops“, you have found two problems at once.

The two mistakes almost everybody makes

First, people count what annoys them most instead of what costs them most. The thing you get worked up about every month may cost twenty minutes. The thing you no longer even notice, because it belongs to the day, costs three hours.

Second, people estimate too low. Almost everybody underestimates themselves, often by half. The reason is mundane. You count the task itself and leave out the searching before it, the interruption in the middle and getting back into it afterwards.

And then?

Sort by hours per week, not by annoyance. Take the top item and ask one single question. Could I explain this to a new temp in ten minutes?

If yes, it can probably be taken off you in part. If no, move on to the next item.

That is the whole method. It costs a sheet of paper and four weeks of attention. So why does almost nobody do it?