Busy measures activity; productive measures progress on the few things that change what your business will be capable of in six months. To close the gap, log the week you had, work out what your hour is worth, and protect a fixed block of forward work in the diary before anything else goes in.
Why does being busy not equal progress?
Email, reactive meetings, admin and questions that should never have reached you fill much of an owner’s day without moving the things that matter.
Busy work finishes: an invoice raised is done and an email answered is gone. Repricing your services, or having the conversation with the person who is not performing, stays unresolved, so attention goes to the work that can be closed and the week fills up.
How do you find out where your week goes?
Log it rather than estimating it, because estimates tend to overstate important work and understate admin and interruptions.
Use paper, phone notes or a spreadsheet. Every time you change task, write down what you moved to and the time, for five working days, without tidying the log.
Then sort the entries into six buckets: quoting and estimating; delivery; answering the team; admin; email and messages outside a dedicated block; and forward work — the work that changes what the business will be capable of in six months.
What is your hour worth?
In this illustrative example, an owner logs a week and it comes to 61 hours: 11 on quoting, 14 on delivery, 9 answering the team and re-checking their work, 12.5 on admin, 8 on email outside any block, and 6.5 on forward work.
Forward work is six and a half hours out of 61.
Now cost the hour. If the owner draws £55,000 a year and works 61 hours across 46 working weeks — 2,806 hours — that is £19.60 an hour. Set it against what the business pays for skilled help: someone on £19 an hour for a 40-hour week over the same 46 weeks costs about £35,000 in salary, and once employer’s National Insurance is added the real cost per working hour is over £21.
So the owner is paid less per hour to run the business than the business pays for skilled help, because of a 61-hour week with 12.5 hours of admin inside it.
Does buying the admin away fix it?
Partly.
Buy back the 12.5 admin hours a week. A part-time administrator at £13.50 an hour working 12 hours a week over 46 weeks costs around £7,450 in salary, and something over £7,800 once employer’s National Insurance is included — roughly £14 for every hour bought back.
That £7,800 a year is cash leaving the business, and the 12 hours it buys back earn nothing unless they go on work that earns. If they are absorbed by more email, quoting and questions, the business is £7,800 a year worse off.
Before the advert goes out, write down what the freed hours will be used for.
What do the freed hours have to earn?
Suppose four of the twelve hours a week, for ten weeks, go to the pricing review that has been postponed for a year, which is forty hours of work.
If the business quotes and wins around £400,000 of new work a year and the review lifts prices on new quotes by 4%, nothing about the cost of doing the work changes, so the whole £16,000 falls through to contribution. Against the £7,800 the administrator costs, that is £8,200 of improvement in the first year, before tax, and the improvement repeats every year afterwards while the wage bill stays where it is.
Forty hours of pricing work produced £16,000, or £400 an hour, against the £19.60 an hour the owner draws.
Which three tests sort the week?
Run every recurring item in your log through three questions, in this order.
- Does this need me specifically? Could a competent person do it to an acceptable standard within three months of being shown? If yes, it is delegatable, and the only remaining question is what it costs.
- Does it need doing at all? Some recurring admin exists because it once solved a problem that no longer exists: the report nobody reads, the approval step nobody uses, the meeting that outlived its purpose two years ago.
- Does it need doing now? Batching everything deferrable into one block on one afternoon recovers hours of fragmented attention a week.
What survives all three is the work that belongs to you.
What stops it all slipping back?
Put forward work into the diary first, as a fixed appointment with a start and an end, and treat it like a customer meeting that does not move for something urgent.
Two protected hours twice a week get more done than a full day a month that keeps being cancelled. Our guide on structuring your week sets out the mechanics, and if interruptions rather than the diary are the binding constraint, stop being the bottleneck is the more useful starting point.
Why is this hard to keep up?
Busyness is socially rewarded, and time spent thinking about pricing rarely is.
Busy work is also emotionally safer. Repricing risks a customer saying no, the performance conversation risks somebody leaving, and reviewing the numbers risks finding out something you would rather not know, while admin risks nothing. Working through what you are avoiding is part of personal coaching, and the rocks, pebbles and sand model helps decide the order things go into a week.
What to do this week
- Log five working days, task change by task change, without tidying it.
- Sort the hours into the six buckets and write down the forward-work total.
- Divide your annual drawings by your logged hours across 46 weeks. That is what your hour is currently paid.
- Run every recurring item through delegate, drop, defer — and price the delegation properly, at salary plus employer’s National Insurance.
- Put two blocks of forward work in next week’s diary before anything else goes in, and name what each block is for.
Check the same number in ninety days.
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Frequently asked questions
I do not have time to log a week. Is there a shortcut?
Yes, a shorter one. The quick option is three days rather than five, recorded on your phone at every task change, with no tidying. That takes perhaps four minutes a day in total and still shows the shape of the week clearly. Do not reconstruct the week from memory on Friday afternoon, because the interruptions drop out. At the end of the three days, sort the entries into the six buckets and add up the forward-work hours. That number is enough to compare against the next log in ninety days.
What if everything on my list needs me?
Test each item. For each item ask whether a competent person could do it to an acceptable standard within three months of being properly shown — not whether they would do it as well as you, and not whether showing them would be quicker than doing it. Where a task truly does need you, the useful question becomes which part needs you: often a decision or a judgement sitting inside a long routine that somebody else could carry right up to that point.
How many hours a week should be forward work?
Start from where you are. If your log shows six or seven hours out of sixty, doubling that over a quarter is a serious improvement and it is achievable. Four to eight protected hours a week is a realistic target for many owner-managed businesses, and the shape matters as much as the total: two blocks of two hours in the diary get more done than one theoretical day a month. Watch the trend. Re-run the log in ninety days, and if the forward-work total has not risen, the diary rule was not being kept.
Is some busywork unavoidable?
Yes. Invoices need raising, suppliers need chasing, someone has to answer the phone. The question is whether it has to be done by the most expensive person in the business, at the moment it arrives, one interruption at a time. Batching it into a fixed block, delegating what passes the three-month test and deleting the items that no longer serve a purpose will reduce it. Put the remainder in a defined slot. Review the slot every quarter to see what can be removed.