The Time Study: A Heavy Week Isn’t Always a Long One
This one is for the leader who ends every week feeling buried and is not sure the hours back that up. It comes from The Part That Doesn’t Fit, the work I do with leaders whose wiring runs a little different, and it is a tool called the Time Study.
Here is what it measures. There are 2 numbers in every week. One is how many hours you actually worked. The other is how heavy the week felt. Most people assume those 2 move together. For a lot of wiring, they do not. A 40-hour week can feel like 70 when it is full of switching, waiting, and things you were dreading. A 55-hour week can feel light when it is spent on work that pulls you in. If you only track the feeling, every heavy week looks like a time problem, and the fix you reach for is more hours, which makes it worse.
So the tool. 5 days, 2 minutes at the end of each one, at the same time each day, before you close the laptop, so it takes the 2 minutes and not 20. First, write the hours you actually worked. Real hours, not the ones it felt like. Second, rate how heavy the day felt, 1 to 10. Third, one line on what made it heavy: a meeting, a task you kept circling, a conversation you were bracing for. At the end of the week, put the 2 numbers side by side and read the gap.
The gap is the useful part. Hours high and weight high is a load problem, and the answer is less. Hours normal and weight high is a friction problem, and the answer is not fewer hours. It is finding the 2 or 3 things that made the days heavy and changing how you meet them. Hours low and weight low is worth noticing too. That is the shape of a good week, and it tells you what to protect.
Then the move. Pick the heaviest line from your week, the one that showed up more than once. Decide one change for it next week: move it earlier, break it smaller, or stop doing it before you feel ready. One change, not 5.
You may find the week was not as long as it felt. That is good news. It means the weight is something you can actually set down.
The Part That Doesn’t Fit. Working with your wiring, not against it. thepartthatdoesntfit.com
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