Shrink
the Clock

The busiest week at my company is the last one of the month.

For three weeks the pipeline barely moves. Someone is still evaluating. Someone will confirm after his plant shutdown. Someone has stopped replying altogether. Then the last few days arrive and orders get closed at a pace nobody could manage on the 12th. The price did not change. The product did not change. The month ended.

Parkinson wrote the line about this in 1955. Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. He was making fun of government offices that kept hiring clerks while the work stayed the same. Setting a date is the one lever in my business that costs nothing to pull, which is why I reach for it first, and also why it is easy to misuse.

What I actually do is small. I give the date before I ask for the plan.

If I ask how long something will take, the answer comes back padded, and fairly so. A few days because the customer may not reply. A few more because finance takes a week to release the payment. A little extra on top because nobody wants to be the one who missed their own estimate. Ask the same person to finish it by Friday and they stop adding up what could go wrong. They start deciding what to drop, whom to call first, which approval to chase and which one to work around. The date ends up doing the prioritising the plan was supposed to do.

The smaller versions of the same idea are everywhere once you look. Our reviews used to run an hour because the calendar suggests an hour, and thirty minutes has cost us nothing so far. A one-page note forces someone to work out what matters before they send it, where ten pages let them hand the deciding to me. When someone asks for two weeks, I ask what the one-week version would look like, not to push them down but to find out which half is the real work.

Then there is the part I got wrong for years. Cutting time is free only when the finish line is mine to move. So before setting any date I ask one question: who has to decide for this to be finished? If the answer is me or someone on my team, a tight date helps. If the answer is somebody outside the company, the date belongs on my own next step and not on their answer.

A farmer deciding whether to sell his crop residue is not on my month-end. He is on his harvest, his cash need, and his memory of the last buyer who promised to pay him and did not. Urgency there does not read as urgency. It reads as pressure, and pressure gets answered fast, usually with a no. So the date I set is for the call I owe him on Tuesday, not for the day he says yes.

The same question catches the other failure. If I cannot describe what finished looks like, I am still figuring the work out, and a tight date on that only buys me a confident wrong answer early. There the date goes on the decision instead of the outcome. By Friday we pick the price for the new state, not by Friday we win the new state.

Has any of this fixed the month-end rush? Not really. The last week is still the heaviest one we have. What changed is that it is no longer the only week where anything closes, because most of the work now carries a date of its own long before the month runs out.

The month ends on its own. Every other deadline I have to set myself, and setting one costs nothing until I put it on something I do not control.