Thinking Time is Productive Time

If a member of your team was seen staring out of the window for the best part of an hour, would you think they were being productive? What if that member was responsible for design or strategy? What about innovation or even business analysis? There are people out there who spend more time finding ways to avoid working during paid hours, but should we assume that everyone is prone to doing that? In the consulting world, it is common to see change management activities measured in days, hours and sometimes even minutes - spent on productive activities. Program and project management (PMO) drive these measures, and it’s usually at the behest of Finance. Finance needs to know if they are getting bang for their buck. And the common way they measure that, is by applying measurable activities to cost. That means days and hours of productive work against the cost (of staff hours or billable contractor time).

But what is the perception of productive work by Finance or PMO? Is it time spent in workshops, constructing a PowerPoint deck or an Excel based report. Or perhaps it’s the actual time spent writing a business case or a request for a proposal. These are measurable if team members could be persuaded to accurately track the amount of time spent on those activities - there are even tools with app-based timer functions that allow staff to get more accurate about measuring that time.

What gets more difficult is when team members are engaged in activities that require a lot of thinking time. That is not as easily measurable, yet can be the most important part of the process of designing something. Thinking about a design and intuitively connecting thoughts into a tangible design, can’t be measured with a stopwatch. One can wake up at 3am and quickly jot down an idea or make a voice recording of an important thought while out walking. There could be multiple instances of these events over a number of days - sometimes weeks.

That “work” is often not counted as work - but it is very important work. In strategy and design, it’s essential to the process of creating something that has a valuable output.

Those are two very important words. VALUE and OUTPUT.

A team could expend a huge amount of measurable days and hours of (what Finance and PMO may perceive as) productive work. But if those days and hours do not result in outputs and those outputs do not create value to the organisation, even accretive contributions to an objective that creates value; then it’s not productive, no matter how easily measurable that work is.

Organisations must redefine how they measure work from time and materials to outputs that deliver value.

I’ve been known to say something along the lines of, “I don’t really care if you spend half the expected time or twice the expected time to deliver something, as long as it’s delivered to the agreed date and the deliverable adds value to the project, the program and the business objectives. If you manage to do it in half the time that you’re paid for, good for you. You are an efficient expert. If you spend twice the time, you’ll put that time in and then figure out how to be more efficient the next time.”

The point is, a team should be paid on their outputs, not on the amount of time spent. We all know teams who spend a lot of time “working” but don’t actually produce something of value. They either spin their wheels and make no forward progress or complete something on time, only to find that what was produced was not aligned to the deliverables or the expected outcome. Days and hours were expended and that time was paid for, but there was no ROI - it did not realise any benefits to the organisation. Sometimes it results in decisions that cost the business time and money.

Changing the definition of delivery from time spent to value outcomes not only takes account of all of the activities that are involved in an objective (including thinking time), it ensures that the team is made up of people who have a focus on value and have the expertise to deliver it. Those who are not able to create value, need not apply. There are plenty of other roles that are paid for time spent doing repeatable actions.