Eleven hours of work, six weeks of calendar

Most jobs spend the overwhelming majority of their life waiting rather than being worked on, and that gap quietly sets your price, your cash cycle and your capacity.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for Eleven hours of work, six weeks of calendar

A client asks why the report took six weeks. Slightly defensive, you pull the time records and add them up: eleven hours. Two people, a handful of sittings, spread across forty-two days. Nobody was idle, nobody was slow, and no one did anything wrong. The work took eleven hours. The job took six weeks. That ratio, hands-on time divided by elapsed time, is usually called flow efficiency, and it is one of the most under-examined numbers in a service business. When firms measure it for the first time, they are…

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