How a Two-Week Time Study Exposes Work Bottlenecks (Full Transcript)
[00:00:00] Speaker 1: When I have these conversations with lapses, this is when I have them do a time study. I need you to tell me what are you doing every day and just kind of evaluate a normal two-week period. What's going on? What are you doing? What are the tasks? And that is illuminating because people always think they're doing more billable work than they are.
[00:00:24] Speaker 2: Yes. I'm like, say it again for the people in the back.
[00:00:28] Speaker 1: You know, like when you see the time study, when you actually start, right, it's almost like dieting, right? Which is off topic. But you think that you're eating really good until you start doing a food journal. And you're like, oh, my gosh, I've been eating a lot of crap. And that's exactly what happens with owners when they when they recognize they're the bottleneck and they start paying attention to the tasks that they are doing. They recognize very quickly that they're doing things that they probably shouldn't be doing.
- Run a time study when performance lapses occur to understand what’s really happening day-to-day.
- Track tasks over a normal two-week period for a realistic baseline.
- Most people overestimate how much billable work they do until they log their time.
- Detailed tracking quickly exposes where an owner is acting as the bottleneck.
- Use insights from the study to stop doing low-value tasks and delegate or reprioritize.