Everyone is busy all week and nothing ships
Track one week of interruptions, waiting, and context-switching. Total the hours. The gap is not a discipline problem.
In manufacturing, inventory is visible. You can walk the floor and see partially finished work sitting there. In knowledge work the inventory is invisible, and it is no less costly for being invisible. Dominica DeGrandis named what that costs in her book Making Work Visible: time theft, all the ways work loses time to interruptions, waiting, and context-switching, none of which shows up unless the work is visible enough to catch it.
This is why asking a team to focus harder does not work. The hours are not going missing inside people. They are going missing between the steps, in the approval that sits overnight, the environment somebody else is holding, the third priority that arrived on Tuesday.
One week of logging makes the total visible. Most teams are surprised by the size of it, and more surprised by which category is largest.
What you get
- The three categories, defined so two people log the same event the same way
- A one-week log with day, event, category, source, and minutes lost
- A Friday total by category, and how to read the result
- A caution on rolling this out to a team without it feeling like surveillance
Where should we send it?
One email with the worksheet. You can unsubscribe from anything else in one click.
On its way
Check your inbox. If it has not landed in a minute or two, look in promotions or spam, and add sam@startuppatterns.com to your contacts so the rest arrive.
Adapted from the Delivery chapter of The Mindful Product Company by Sam McAfee.