On the Volume of Work

Life is finite. Apologies for breaking it to you so starkly but there it is. How you fill the time you have left will be a balance of the stuff you have to do, the things you choose to do and the large amount of time wasted on things you are drawn to do but usually regret. I have written previously on a simple way of viewing this breakdown. This very rough calculation suggested that somewhere around 45% of your time - before retirement - is spent on work. Unsurprisingly, also a finite amount. And the fact that it is finite leads directly to the use of words like “busy” or “swamped”. This happens because we rarely put time into measuring the amount of work we have relative to the amount of work time we have. We deal with this by having coping mechanisms. We prioritise, we delegate, we increase the finite time we have by working longer days or weekends and, by and large, we muddle through. Sometimes we’re tired, sometimes we don’t do our best work, sometimes we make structural changes when things get too much. But we never measure the amount of work, mainly because we don’t know how.

Measuring work is hard and most people will view the job of estimating the amount of work as a waste of their finite time. Yet, I think there is some merit in taking some time to understand how work time is filled and how it relates to finite capacity and what happens when the two are out of balance. To do this, I am going to reuse the well-worn phrase “volume of work” and simply ask the question - how do you calculate that volume?

For starters, you need three dimensions. Consider the following:

Breadth - the scope of your role, how many work areas/functions you cover

Depth - how much detail you need to go into in each area

Quality - how well you do it, quality of output

The volume is measured in time represented by time allocated across the three dimensions.

Over the course of a career - and using a sweeping generalisation - the shape of your work “box” changes from a tall thin box to a wide thin box. You start in the detail and, as you progress, you move up and out into management with a very broad remit. I started out writing code at a very detailed level. Now I do whatever is I do across a very wide variety of topics. The amount of time I have to do work hasn't really changed.

In reality, everyone’s work box will be a cubist nightmare, depth in some places, light touch in others and, we would all argue, exemplary quality across the board. The key point is, whatever the shape, the available volume of work you can do, is finite. When we start to feel we are doing too much it will be when the volume of your cubist nightmare exceeds your available work volume. We may have coping mechanisms for that but the reality is you can only fill your work box with the volume you have so something has to give.

Either:

1. You ignore something from across the breadth of your role
2. You don’t go to the necessary level of detail in some areas
3. The quality suffers

(I could have chosen to draw some high quality images but I chose to drop the quality to save time - after all, this isn’t even work. Although, what has happened to my handwriting?)

It is obviously very difficult - perhaps impossible - to draw real versions of these but, as a visualisation, it may help you understand the nature of the beast that faces you at work and make you better understand the daily compromises you make to deal with any imbalance in volume. Those conscious choices are the positive aspect. The concern comes when there is an unconscious reduction in quality that results from the imbalance. Similarly, you may be coping by increasing the amount of work volume you have, working longer hours, tiring yourself out and, by another route, cause a reduction in the quality of your work. One approach could be to fix the quality axis and only make adjustments in breadth or depth.

Many things can impact this in the course of a busy work life. You may get dragged down in more detail than you were expecting in some areas, you may end up taking on new work that extends you breadth. You will do this because you are a hard worker and a hero. But, when you do this, you are using up the finite volume available, therefore, something has had to give. Always best to make that a conscious choice.

Work life is finite, it fits neatly into a box. Have a think about how best you fill it.