The Executive's Guide to Saving Ten Hours per Week

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WAYNE RIVERS: Hi everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors, where We Build Better Contractors.

This week, I want to talk about the Executive's Guide to Saving 10 Hours a Week. Wow, 10 hours a week, and here it is. It's from a company called Belay. It's a downloadable short report, and it came from the CEO Network Daily Briefing, you've heard me talk about that a million times, on December 1st of 2025. They say in this report that according to Harvard, the average company loses more than 20% of its productive capacity due to organizational drag, like meetings, approvals and bureaucracy. I can believe it. I can believe it. Hopefully, that's not the case in your company, but I've seen it.

Now, what about this is important to you? What's your number one most valuable resource? When I used to do presentations all over, I would ask the audience for a show of hands, "What's the thing you have the least of in your life?" And the hands would go up and I'd call on people, it's always time. That is your most valuable commodity, that is your most constrained resource. What would you do if you had 10 extra hours a week? That's just an amazing thing. Maybe you'd just go home. Maybe you'd just be present with the family. Maybe you would exercise more or go shopping for healthy foods or something. It doesn't have to be 10 additional hours of work, although it could be, it certainly could be. What would you do with 10 extra hours a week?

So some tips from Belay in terms of managing your time. They talked about number one... They talked about three of these time wasters, if you will. Number one is the calendar tax, number two is coordination drag is how they phrased it, and number three is rework loops. They said the calendar tax consumes six to seven hours a week, the coordination drag requires three to four hours a week, and rework loops two to three hours a week. If you add it up, even on the low end, it's 11 hours a week, but still, they're making a pretty good point.

Okay, what's the calendar tax? Number one, meetings. I was on a Teams call this morning and we were lamenting the fact that Teams or Zoom or whatever you use has made calling meetings so much easier than what we used to experience, that consequently there's more of them now. So there's actually more meetings on your calendar now than there were prior to COVID because there's less friction, there's less friction in calling meetings. You can say, "Boom, I'm going to send a Teams invite for tomorrow at 9:00 AM," and there it is. And there's now another and another and another. Before long, it just adds up. So meeting overload is a real thing.

The second thing is interruptions. I remember reading ages ago that the average corporate manager gets interrupted once about every four minutes. Think about that. And it's got to be worse today with the... I mean, that was before technology was so prevalent, it's got to be worse today. So interruptions are a real thing. It just takes so much time to refocus and restart, so interruptions are a big drag. And then, the third one is approval delays. Hopefully, you don't have too much of that in your company. But I do know, from looking at our post-roundtable meeting reports, that a lot of our members do have bottlenecks in their companies in the sense that they have one or two or three people only that can approve certain things, and that creates a drag and bottleneck, for sure.

Okay. The second thing, coordination drag, chasing answers. Well, only so-and-so can approve that and she's on vacation for 10 days, and so we've got to now see if we can go around this loop and find someone else who can approve it. I can see that that can be a thing too, coordination drag for three to four hours a week. And then, the third thing is rework loops. They said that vague requirements, changing objectives and constant revision of items cause rework, and so you have to go back to the drawing board and edit this and change that and improve that and all these other things.

"Time traps don't just burn hours, they drain focus, judgment and momentum." Man, really well-said. If I didn't get anything else out of this short report, that would be it. That's really profound, I think. Okay. How do you get your time back? We'll get right there in a second. They also had a great quote from Steve Jobs, "Innovation is saying no to a thousand things." That's the best way to get your time back is start saying no. Do you need me in this meeting? Am I critical to the successful outcome of this meeting? And a lot of times, the answer is no.

Okay. How do you get some of your time back? Well, don't let your calendar get completely consumed with meeting after meeting after meeting. Create white space in your calendar so that you can work on important tasks, you can close the door, you can close your laptop, turn off your phone, so that you're not interrupted every four minutes. So create white space in your calendar, 30 minutes a day, two hours a day, figure it out. What works for you? How much can you create? Maybe start with 30 minutes and work up from there.

The second thing I learned back in the days of paper memos, this goes back into the 1980s, I'm embarrassed to say, but the four Ds, do it, ditch it, delegate it or delay it. And this was for handling paper, but it could apply to handling emails, it could apply to handling meetings. So number one, do it. Yeah, this is a meeting I need to be in, I'm critical to the outcome, it draws on my unique ability, yeah, I'm in there. So do it. Second thing is ditch it. Nah, I'm saying no to this completely, it's not important, it's urgent for someone, but it's not urgent for me.

Three, and contractors are terrible at this, delegate it, delegate it. Man, that's one of my superpowers, I can delegate like crazy, and I've got a great, great team that supports me. So golly, it's just so easy, but if you don't have the kind of people to whom you can delegate and trust that things are going to get done, you might have to review your people and your staffing and maybe even your culture. And the fourth thing is delay it. Okay, yeah, this is important, this does draw on my unique ability, but I can't get to it until at least next month. Get it on the calendar, get it scheduled, get your resources and your people in order, and go ahead and plan for it.

Okay. Number three, do standup meetings. I forget what they're... Huddles, huddles. This comes from the IT industry, they created this stuff. Start off your morning with a standup meeting, short, not more than 15 minutes, I always like a written agenda to keep everybody on track, and have a time limit. If it's 15 minutes, that's fine. Maybe you only need seven minutes in the morning to get underway. So standup meetings work really well. And then, you can call them anytime of the day and say, "Hey, I need to get y'all in the conference room real quick for... I need to brainstorm on this." And there again, short, have an agenda if possible, and keep it to 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever you need.

The fourth thing, this was a Stephen Covey thing from ages ago, he talked about there was the example of how to take all this material and put it into a small bucket, and his advice was put the big rocks in first. Go to YouTube, there's plenty of videos on this now, but put the big rocks in first. What are your big rocks? What are the things that you need to work on? What are the things that draw on your unique ability? How can you move the agenda forward in your company uniquely, move the agenda forward in a way that nobody else in your company can? So you want to focus on your highest and best use, your unique ability, and the big picture, which of course, going back to your strategic plan, what are your big picture items in your plan that your team agreed on and you all worked on? Don't let that strategic plan sit on the shelf and gather dust, work on it every week.

The fifth thing, take breaks. It's sort of a cliche now, touch grass. I don't know where that came from, it sounds silly, but it's a recommendation. Get outside, look at the sky, look at the clouds, see what's going on outside, listen to the hum of the traffic. Maybe there's a park nearby, you can go walk and you can see kids play. Get out of your own head, get out of your space, just take five minutes, walk around the parking lot, experience the cold or the heat or the drizzle or whatever it is, but get outside and take breaks. The idea that you should be stuck in an office or a cubicle or something for eight hours a day with your head down working is just... I mean, that's almost anti-human, in a manner of speaking.

Okay. And of course, the biggest one, the sixth recommendation I have for getting your time back is just say no. That's another superpower I have, I can say no like crazy. And maybe saying no is delegating, in a way. You're not saying no exactly, but you're saying, "No, I can't do it, I'm constrained, but I think someone else would be able to help you."

Okay. 10 hours a week? I don't know. What do you think? Email me, [email protected].

This is Wayne Rivers at PCA, where We Build Better Contractors.

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