Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

by Dominica Degrandis

While the number of minutes available to us each day might be the same, control over what we do with those hours differs significantly.

Anyone who has ever been faced with a deadline can certainly relate to Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

We allow the chaos of modern work coupled with an often paralyzing number of options at our disposal to overload us, to distract us, to stealthily steal our time and focus and ultimately impede our effectiveness.

Our culture of overwork, our obsession with productivity versus effectiveness, our default mode of existing rather than living—these things aren’t simply unnatural and unhealthy, they’re unsustainable—for the individual, for the team, for the organization’s bottom line.

Indeed, time is sacred. Treat it as such. Visualize your work. Limit the amount of work you take on. Pay attention to its flow. Build thoughtful work systems to reflect what really matters. To breathe. To think. To learn. To grow. To play. To love. To live. For it is in working well that we can live well.

We overload ourselves and we overload our teams—this is the everyday reality within the information technology sector. And, because we get interrupted all the time, we stop work on one task and start work on a different task, from one project to the next, never focusing on one thing long enough to do it justice.

Learning what to measure changed my world. Ranting didn’t work, but measuring cycle time (the time it takes to do work) and presenting that data to leadership, did. I was able to influence leadership then and got buy-in to hire additional team members.