Metrics To Measure Your Time
Operating your life like a call center
I spent years working on improving a call center model so I have tons of metrics to choose from, but three seem most applicable to our own lives. But first, let’s go through an example. Let’s say a worker is clocked in and paid for 8 hours. In that time we would like her to solve as many customer’s questions over the phone as possible. The average worker can do 10 per hour. Of the 8 hour shift the worker has two breaks totaling 30 minutes and gets 1 hour of training. The remaining 6.5 hours they are available to answer the phone. So the first metric we have here is occupancy.
Occupancy = time dedicated / time in period = 6.5 / 8 = 81%
During those 6.5 hours talking to customers there are some periods where no one called. So she actually ends up on the phone for 5.5 hours. Not all of her time was utilized serving customers.
Utilization = time doing tasks / time dedicated = 5.5 / 6.5 = 85%
During the time she was on the phone the agent completed 66 calls.
Throughput = tasks completed / period of time = 66 calls / 5.5 hours = 12 calls / hour
To increase the number of tasks you complete you can increase your throughput, utilization, or occupancy. If this agent wasn’t idle for an hour and had 100% utilization, then she could have completed 12 * 6.5 = 78 calls. If we eliminated training that would have also freed up an hour and also would have resulted in 78 calls. If we said instead of 12 calls an hour we want 18 then 99 calls could have been done.
As you can imagine, you can’t simply run at 100% occupancy and utilization with a super high throughput. Why? Quality would suffer. Workers would burn out. Your customers would end up calling back when their problems didn’t get solved (why we have more metrics to look at such as resolution rate and first touch resolution).
Your Time
Now that you’ve had your crash course in workforce management metrics, how can we apply this to your schedule?
How you spend your time says a lot about you, perhaps even more than how you spend your money. Each person has 24 hours a day and 168 hours a week. Assuming you sleep 8 hours and work 40 hours that’s 96 hours (57%) accounted for and 74 hours left.
With that 43% you get to choose what to do. You may decide you want to earn more money and take on a second job or try a side hustle. You may like sports and get really into pickleball. You might get addicted to TikTok. How you spend it is up to you.
This is where the metrics come in. You probably don’t think of your time as a commodity, but we can use numbers to tease out some efficiencies.
Examples
Children
Lot’s of people will say they like to spend time with their kids and would enjoy doing more of it. However, their calendars may not reflect that. So let’s dive into the numbers.
Only you can decide what is the optimal amount of time with your children, but let’s say you decide you want to spend 4 hours a day with them. I’m going to use 16 hours as our denominator since 8 is dedicated to sleep. So your occupancy would be 4/16. 25% of your waking hours are dedicated to spending quality time with your kids.
During those 4 hours you likely want to be fully present. However, you’re a modern human with a smartphone so maybe you get sidetracked and end up only being present for 3 hours so you get 75% (3/4) utilization. Occupancy * Utilization will give you much of the day you were present. In this case 19% (4/16 * 3/4) of your waking hours you were fully present watching your kids. If your goal was 4 hours present though, then you’d need to increase your occupancy or utilization. You’d need to spend 5 hours and 20 minutes with your kid and were distracted 25% of the time, or you’d need to increase your utilization to 100% by being distraction-free.
Personally, I think it is better to have your utilization as high as possible. If I’m distracted on my phone for an hour it probably is less productive than if I had an hour not watching my kid. If my throughput is normally reading 300 tweets an hour, then maybe while making sure my child doesn’t wander off or fall off the playground I can only get 100 tweet an hour. So really I should focus on the kid and then take 20 minutes after to get the 100 tweets that would’ve taken an hour while distracted. Obviously this is a simplification as you can’t so easily switch from task to task, but I hope it demonstrates the concepts.
Pickleball
Kids are tricky because there’s an emotional component to it and they need you, so for the next example we’ll use something you totally don’t need in your life, pickleball. You love pickleball and want to play more. What play more means to you is to be holding a paddle on the court. Your schedule is full, but you’ve managed to allocate 2 hours 4 days a week to pickleball, but still think that it’s not enough. Let’s break it down.
Currently you play on a public court 15 minutes away. With the commute you’ve actually dedicated 10 hours a week to pickleball. It’s always crowed so you end up rotating in about half of the time. That means each day you play you end up spending 2.5 hours for only 1 hour of play time. Your occupancy of pickleball plus commute is 7.8% (10 pickleball hours / 128 waking hours). Your utilization is 1 hour per 2.5, so 40%. Since your schedule is maxed out you don’t really want to spend more time on it, so you want to explore other options to play more.
Public courts 15 minutes away.
Public courts 30 minutes away, no wait time.
Private club 5 minutes away, better players, no wait time. $25 a week.
If you stayed with option one you get 4 hours a week of play time. However, if you could somehow reduce the number of sessions you could get rid of some commute time. With 3 sessions you’d save 30 minutes and get 15 additional minutes of play. With 2 sessions you’d save 1 hour commuting and get 30 additional minutes of play. 30 minutes is an additional 12.5% which isn’t too bad, but I’m not sure how realistic spending 4.5 hours per session at a public court is.
At first glance option two sounds worse. Why would you drive further and spend an hour round trip? Well, if you stuck with 10 hours over 4 sessions that means. You’d only have 6 hours at the courts, but all 6 hours would be playing. So you are actually getting 50% more play time despite driving more. You are trading wait time for commute and play time.
Option three costs money, so many wouldn’t consider it, but we should do some math so we are informed. With only a 5 minute drive that means 9 hours and 20 minutes playing per week. That’s 133% more play time than you currently get. You are paying $25 to gain 5.33 hours of play time. Essentially you are purchasing your time at a rate of less than $5 an hour. To me that seems like a great deal. In this scenario your utilization is a staggering 93%.
Work
For tasks which the time is fixed, you won’t be able to change your occupancy. You might need to be at work for 8 hours whether you have a ton to do or very little. For these situation throughput is probably a better metric. If you are a recruiter you could measure the number of candidates you find per hour. A salesperson could measure dollars of deals closed per month. It’s not always so simple because the relationship isn’t always linear between time spent and output.
Finding the balance
Sometimes it’s not productive to try to get to 100% utilization. Imagine if you were a software engineer and every time you stopped to think for more than 10 seconds your computer started beeping. I’d argue that thinking is still being utilized, but the computer can’t tell and you end up just tapping keys every so often which ends up bringing your throughput down. Also, you could skip meals to keep utilization high, but it would also impact your mood and therefore your throughput.
You want to be efficient, but you don’t want to burn out or make too many mistakes. It’s tiring to be constantly “on” so you need to assess what makes sense for you. There’s not reason to optimize metrics for their own sake, you want to optimize your life and wellbeing. Imagine a chair lift in winter. A snowboarder complains that the lines are too long. The resort owner looks at her metrics and says we only have 50% utilization even though there’s always a line and we need to increase throughput. Well the reason there’s 50% utilization is because snowboarders want to ride the lift up the mountain and almost no one rides it down. To get to 100% you’d need to load people coming down and that isn’t what the customers want. You could increase throughput by speeding up the lift, but at some point someone will get hurt and you’ll have to stop it.
You know yourself best, but you may not have considered occupancy, utilization, and throughput before. I challenge you to document where your time goes and see if it matches up with where you would like it to. Perhaps there’s a constraint you can relax and get more occupancy in an area you find important. See what may be lowering your utilization and if there are ways you can get your time back.