Where Does Our Time Actually Go?

MeyerFire University | BS103.09

By Joe Meyer, PE

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TRANSCRIPT

WHERE DOES OUR TIME ACTUALLY GO? 

INTRODUCTION

In this series we’ve been talking all about effectiveness in our work. 

How can we multiple our output without doubling our time spent or sacrificing quality? 

If we can answer that, we can create a much-better, much-improved work experience and honestly a little more cushion between the hectic pace and needs of our work life and the time that we have to do it. 

We ran a thought experiment, and then talk about one of the ways we incorporated change. 

A SELF-STUDY

As a time reference, this all went down somewhere in 2016 to 2018. In 2019, I went out on my own to be able to spend more time writing articles and developing tools and developing training just like this.

The first couple years I needed some cashflow, though, and I went pretty much all-in on shop drawing fire sprinkler design.

I was deep into the details of shop drawing design, doing everything from the water supply to layout to stocklists. And because I was on my own, I never had more incentive, ever, to be more productive with my time.

What suddenly became reality at that time was that if I could do twice the output, in the same amount of time, at the same level of quality – well – then I would literally double my revenue.  

There was never really any ceiling preventing me being far more effective in my past roles – but this was about being effective on steroids. 

And if being effective was like steroids in baseball, then I was Jose Canseco in the 90s. I mean I went deep into figuring out where the heck I was spending time and how I could change my process for the better. 

IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT DIVING IN THE DEEP END

As an important note – I went way overboard on this. I mean people talk about timesheets and assigning an hour here or an hour there. I went minute by minute, and recorded every single task. I went way, way beyond overboard.  

I’m not recommending this – primarily because you just don’t need to do that – but it got to a point where even my wife said I didn’t need to think about every hour of my week in terms of billable rate. I could cool the jets and smell the roses a little more – so to speak. 

I think there were great takeaways I learned from the process, but I don’t live today in hindsight of all of this trying to squeeze every minute out of every day, nor am I necessarily involved in the same type of design work anymore. So just saying, I came back up for air and fixed some of my quirks. Some of them. 

INVESTMENT PRINCIPLE

The principle I was working from is more of an investment mindset. 

It was about taking a little time to sharpen the knife, so that using the knife would be far easier. 

What can I sink some time now, so that I can save tons and tons of time later? 

If I have an opportunity to invest time – say 10 hours now but it would save me nearly 2-hours on each job? Say like the specification edits from the last segment?

Well, in only about five jobs – that investment is going to pay off. And then forever-after, I have a major return on that time. The longer I go after that change, the more I benefit from doing it. 

THE QUESTION I NEEDED TO ANSWER

So if I’m going to figure out where to invest – what will actually yield the biggest impact, then I first had to know – where was it that my time was actually going? 

If I knew where my time was going, then maybe I could see where it was wasted, and where instead it could be better spent. 

THE STUDY

So what I did in this time study, and keep in mind I was working on my own so my departure from reality here wasn’t really being monitored by anyone else. 

I wrote down a list of tasks that I thought I did for every job. 

And what I started doing was recording time – literally the amount of minutes – that it took me to complete that task for the job.  

I started using this rough lists of tasks as a checklist. Complete this first, then this, then this. If you’ve seen the Workflow series then you’re familiar with where I ended up on this list. 

I would literally print out the list, and record the time as 8:23 then 8:29 then 8:38 then 8:52 next to each task, and when I was done with the project, do the math and enter all the time for each job. 

It was raw data for each task on each job. 

Joe this is looney. I know. But remember, I was on my own here. 

LOOKING AT THE RAW DATA

I looked over the raw data after a number of jobs. Then I kept collecting the data. 

If you were to ask me – where is most of your time spent? 

I would have said the layout of course. I take time to route pipe and place sprinklers and check obstructions and those kinds of things. I spend all my time in the layout. 

But that wasn’t reality. Far from it.  

I started to see things like all this time going to creating site plans. Or all this time going to modeling riser assemblies. 

Or all this time going to connect sprinklers to branch pipe. 

Why were those repeatedly getting so much of my attention? 

If it was one job, and I saw a squirrel out the window and then was on facebook for an hour. Fine, that’s on me. But when the same task was taking a substantial amount of time job-to-job, that’s when it really merits some additional attention.  

Now how do we make the improvements? What are our options? 

Well the ideas I’d have in mind from all the books and reading and youtube videos and everything else was this list of six.

HOW TO MAKE IMPROVEMENTS?

Eliminate, automate, equip, train, improve the process, or better support.  

These are our options if we’re going to make change ourselves and not going to hire internally or hire externally. 

So let’s look at some of the data. 

OVERALL PLANS

Here’s a graph of one of the tasks on that list. This is part of my workflow, putting plans on each sheet and developing and overall plan.  

So along the bottom x-axis is just the number of the project, starting from the first project I tracked all the way through number 58. 

Then on the vertical axis is the time spent on each project to complete that task. 

Now the goal all along is being more effective and reducing time on each task. 

So around project 8, 9 and 11 I spent an hour and a half to two hours doing this. What’s up with that? Could have been a unique job – maybe I ended up doing that task multiple times because I did things out of order. Could have been manually doing a process across a large job.  

I was adapting and trying new tweaks and things to bring down the average time per job. 

On this task, I tried a few different things. Mostly, I pre-set up my views on sheets in the job template, I cleaned up the template, and then I used some Revit add-in third-party tools that allow me to duplicate sheets and set this up a whole lot quicker than doing it manually. 

The orange dashed curve is a running average of the prior ten jobs. You can see that as time went along, that average trended down and there was a whole lot less variability job to job.  

Keep in mind this wasn’t exactly the first time I’d ever done this kind of work. So it wasn’t like I had to reinvent the wheel at the first job. Let’s look at another task. 

RISER DETAIL

Here are riser details. At the first dozen jobs or so, I had a lot of variability. Detailing on one job, project #20, took me two hours to detail. 

Again we’re seeing a general downward trend as the projects progressed on. 

What was the change here? 

Some of the things I incorporated was pre-loading families, making a list of all the changes I wanted to make to the template and incorporating those into the template before I’d start a job, and on this task specifically I had a few common setups pre-modeled, ready to go in a separate file. I could copy those and drop them right into my project with the detailing and all ready to go.  

Some of these jobs early on were 40 minutes, 45 minutes, 75 minutes, yet by the end of this study of the last thirty projects the most amount of time on riser details was about a half hour. That’s good. That’s being much more effective. 

Joe you cooked the books.  

Well keep in mind I was actively working to improve the process, but when I was recording all this data I was just looking for ways to self-improve. 

SPRINKLER LAYOUT

Now what about the think I would have thought took most of the job? 

The sprinkler layout – actually placing sprinklers on a job, does take a substantially longer amount of time. But there were improvements here too. 

I improved the sprinkler families (or the block basically) in Revit with coverage limits that sped up the layout process. I learned new ways to layout sprinklers in a space faster, and align them quicker, using third party tools in Revit.  

And the trends here are noticeable too. 

STOCKLISTING PIPE

One of the things I was really slow at towards the beginning was stocklisting a project, but that too improved. 

How?  

I began bundling things together and having my default setups organized and ready to copy and paste.  

For instance – when I tap off a riser with a welded outlet, I use a short stick of ½” diameter pipe with a bushing and a little three-way valve that connects the pressure gauge and a little plug on the end. There’s four pieces to that which I used to search, scroll, select, and then add to the project. 

What I did instead was take the list I usually use, put it over in a spreadsheet, and now when I have that situation I just copy all those objects and paste them into the list.  

Saves a ton of time – especially when I do that across all the other different objects on a job. 

Another thing I began doing was organizing schedules in my model, that would spit out cleaner lists for me to use for stocklisting. 

I’m not hand-counting or selecting-all in a project for my loose materials – instead I pull up a schedule I’ve pre-built in the template, and can use that to quickly build up my list.  

Those two things cut out a ton of time during the stocklisting process. 

Now not all tasks ended up like this. Some stayed steady of course. But that leads to the question - how much did effectiveness increase overall? 

OVERALL EFFECTIVENESS

From the point that I started collecting the data, in 2019, to a point 58 projects in, roughly 2-years later, I wanted to know what the increase actually was. I didn’t calculate this until I prepared this study, so I was especially interested in it myself. 

Here are all those same 58 projects, and what I did is I took the overall fee with that job and divided it by the total time I spent on the job. 

It’s essentially an effective earning rate. These are fixed-fee projects, so I take the fee divided by the time spent on the project and I can back out what the effective earning rate is. 

Now don’t make this weird for me. I didn’t put in dollar amounts on the vertical axis so that this doesn’t become awkward. I’ve also toyed with the increment amounts on that axis and didn’t zero it out at the bottom – so whatever dollar amount you’re guessing it equates to – it doesn’t.  

But what I am interested in is where did these projects land, and did the effective earning rate go up? 

It did. In taking the moving average from the beginning of the study to the end, we’re looking at a (roughly) 59% improvement in productivity. 

Now statistically we wouldn’t call this a correlation. After all it’s a biased sample. I constantly tweaking my process from job-to-job, and it’s not like those improvements are going to exactly mirror some consistent improvement.  

You could also say that knowing some of the information may have spoiled the sample because I did a better job in estimating work. If I knew with a little more clarity how much time a job would take, then I could better price a project and be able to extract a better effective fee. And that’s possible, but the window here isn’t terribly long, and even if that did happen – wouldn’t it suggest being more effective anyways?  

Knowing this is not a rigorously scientific, I would still say that understanding some of the data and refining the process is the goal, and improving over time is the end-goal. 

DID SIZE OF PROJECT AFFECT RESULTS?

But the first thing that stood out and I wanted to know – was the type or size of a project spoiling my results? 

I would have thought – maybe projects 8, 9 and 11 took so much more time because they were larger and they were weighing down the results. 

I looked into that. But it’s not the case. Here is each of the same project, except the size of the dot matches the size of the project. Projects 8, 9, and 11 weren’t actually that big of jobs. The jobs didn’t become all smaller or all bigger over time; there was still some variability. 

And what’s up with that job way up at the top? I need to find more like those. 

So did effectiveness double? No, but again the original goal wasn’t necessarily to increase productivity by double, it was to help us be significantly more effective in what we do so that we can spend our time in better places. 

WHERE DID THE TIME GO?

So where did my time actually go in design? 

I charted it. And here it is, in aggregate. 

I don’t think these are as useful as they might suggest – each of these tasks are just part of my checklist and mean something very specific to me, but that’s because it’s entirely based on my process. 

In the big-picture, quite a bit of time is taken by meetings, site visits, working on the template prior to each job, laying out mains, sprinklers and pipe, coordination, and then as design progresses, hydraulic calculations and tagging pipe. 

Finally with stocklisting, time for revisions, listing the pipe and then going through the loose material lists takes me the most time. 

This is good for where to invest time, sure, but it’s really only specific to the process I have. 

If, and only if, you’re looking for certainty on where you can save the most time, consider tracking what it is that you’re doing down to a task-by-task basis. I think it becomes pretty obvious pretty quick. 

SUMMARY

So where does the time go? 

Well, in my process I tracked the time down to the minute and studied the change in that for each task over time.  

In doing so, some of the most time-consuming processes could be understood, tracked, and tinkered with to bring the time involved in working on them down. 

In the next segment we’re going to go beyond this data and talk about ten lessons learned that we can pull away from the study. 

I’m Joe Meyer, this is MeyerFire University.