Working Hours, Magical Thinking, and the Art of Managerial Logic

Let’s talk about work planning, shall we? The kind where, at the start of the year, you look at the roughly 1,650 hours in the calendar and think,?"Yes, this year will be different. This year, everything will go according to plan."?Ah, sweet optimism.

Now, imagine you, the dutiful manager, allocate only 90% of those hours at the beginning of the year. You’ve left a little breathing room—165 glorious hours—to catch your breath, handle unexpected tasks, and maybe even squeeze in some actual strategic thinking. Sensible, right?

Fast forward to January in an academic environment. Half the year is gone, and someone—a manager, perhaps, with a pristine spreadsheet—starts to wonder why the magical pot of 165 leftover hours isn’t gleaming as brightly as they imagined. Surely those unused hours are sitting somewhere, waiting to be deployed, right? Right?

Wrong. And here’s where things get interesting.

Here’s the thing about those 165 hours: they’re not like a savings account, quietly accruing interest. They’re more like ice cubes on a sunny day—disappearing steadily, bit by bit, as the chaos of real life melts them away. Meetings expand. Deadlines shift. Someone, somewhere, decides they need "just 10 minutes of your time" (which, let’s be honest, is always at least 30).

By the time you hit mid-year, those hours have already been frittered away in the background noise of daily work life. They didn’t evaporate because of laziness or inefficiency—they vanished because the reality of work is messy, unpredictable, and occasionally absurd.

And yet, there’s always that one manager who clings to the belief that those hours are still out there, like some mythical treasure hidden at the bottom of the fiscal calendar. They’ll argue, with the kind of confidence usually reserved for bad karaoke singers, that the hours haven’t been spent.?“The math doesn’t lie,”?they’ll insist.

Sure, the math may not lie, but it doesn’t have much to say about the 45-minute meeting that turned into a two-hour existential debate about coffee quality. Or the 17 emails required to schedule a single meeting. Or the time spent staring blankly at a screen after your third unplanned crisis of the week.

Here’s the kicker: this belief—that hours can somehow accumulate and remain neatly available—is not just flawed logic. It’s also a telltale sign of someone who’s spent more time with Excel than with real-life teams. Because anyone who’s actually worked in the trenches knows that hours don’t just hang around, waiting to be claimed. They slip away quietly, unnoticed, while you’re busy trying to do the job you were already allocated.

Now, let’s be fair. Managers aren’t inherently out of touch (well, not all of them). It’s easy to fall into the trap of spreadsheet logic, where everything looks neat and tidy, and time appears to behave like a perfectly obedient resource. But work planning isn’t about neatness. It’s about navigating the delightful chaos of real life with a bit of foresight and a lot of flexibility.

So here’s some advice for those managers who might still be holding onto the illusion of leftover hours: let it go. Those hours aren’t hiding under the desk. They’ve already been absorbed into the natural flow of work—swallowed by unplanned tasks, interruptions, and the simple reality of human unpredictability.

Instead of lamenting their disappearance, focus on creating realistic plans that allow for the messiness of real life. Build in flexibility, but don’t treat it as an emergency stash. And, for the love of all things caffeinated, don’t wait until December to discover that your team is, in fact, made up of humans, not machines.

Work planning is an art, not a science. And while it’s tempting to believe that unused hours will patiently wait for you to discover them, the reality is far less forgiving. Hours that aren’t allocated early don’t just sit idle—they get spent in ways you’ll never see on a spreadsheet.

So let’s stop pretending otherwise. Let’s accept that work is messy, that flexibility is essential, and that clinging to the myth of "spare hours" only serves to make you look, well, a little out of touch. Because in the end, the best managers aren’t the ones who master the spreadsheet—they’re the ones who master the reality behind it.

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