The hours you don't see: a five-day time study you can run yourself
Ask an owner how much time goes to repeat office work and you get a guess. Ask the people doing it and you get a different number. Here's how to find the real one in a week.
Ask the owner of a 25-person firm how much of the office's week goes to repeat work and the answer is usually "a few hours". Ask the estimator, the coordinator and the person who does billing and you get a very different number. Neither is lying. Repeat work just doesn't look like work from the outside.
It hides in small pieces. Four minutes to read an RFQ and forward it. Twelve minutes to find last year's quote for the same client. Twenty minutes to chase a field ticket so an invoice can go out. Nobody books those minutes, so nobody counts them, so nobody fixes them.
A time study fixes the counting. You don't need software or a consultant to run one. You need five days, a shared sheet and the two or three people who actually do the work.
Before you start: pick three workflows
Choose the three that feel most repetitive, not the three that annoy you most. Some starting points by industry:
- Property and strata management: triaging tenant and owner requests, writing owner reports, answering the same bylaw and maintenance questions.
- Engineering and technical consulting: proposal first drafts, finding past project details, status updates to clients.
- Oil and gas services: field tickets to invoices, job packages and sign-offs, daily reports.
- Specialty contractors: reading bids and RFQs, building quotes, change orders.
- Marine and shipyard services: survey write-ups, refit quotes, tracking hours against the job.
The sheet: five columns
Give each person a tab with these columns and nothing else:
| Start | End | Workflow | What started it | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8:42 | 8:58 | Quoting | RFQ email from GC | Looked for last year's quote, couldn't find it |
| 9:15 | 9:21 | Bid intake | Shared inbox | Forwarded to estimating |
| 13:05 | 13:40 | Field report to invoice | Ticket from site | Missing hours, called the foreman |
Example rows, for illustration.
Three rules for the week
- Log it when it happens. End-of-day memory loses the small pieces, and the small pieces are the point.
- Count the waiting and chasing. Calling the foreman for missing hours is part of the invoice. Searching for the old quote is part of the quote.
- No judging. This isn't a performance review. Say so out loud on Monday, or people will round down.
Friday: add it up
Total the hours per workflow for the week. Then turn the hours into money:
hours a week × loaded hourly cost × 48 weeks
Loaded cost is wages plus benefits and overhead. For estimators, coordinators and project staff, $60 an hour is a sensible starting point; use your own.
Say the three people log 38 hours of repeat work between them. At $60 an hour that is $109,440 a year of payroll spent on work that follows the same steps every time. That's an illustrative figure, not a client's. Run it with your own people and your own rate.
What the number tells you
Rank the workflows by two things: hours, and how rule-based the work is. The ones that are both big and predictable are where systems take the first draft and your people check it. The ones that need judgement stay with people, and the study usually shows those people are spending less time on them than you'd want, because the repeat work gets there first.
One more thing: have the owner or GM sign the totals. A signed number is a baseline. Everything you try after this, with us or anyone else, can be measured against it.
Common mistakes
- Timing one person. The work moves between people. Time everyone who touches it.
- Timing a weird week. Skip year-end and the week of a big bid.
- Stopping at the number. The study is only worth it if the top two workflows get fixed.
If you'd rather not run it yourself, the Time Audit gives you a planning estimate in five minutes. And in the free first week, we run this study with your team, sign the baseline with you, and put the first build live.