The problemPlans are made of people who are already busy
Every initiative plan lists names. Nobody adds them up. The principal architect appears on six plans, the security architect on five, the one engineer who understands the order service on four. Each plan is reasonable. Together, they describe a week nobody could work.
The cost appears as slips nobody can explain: reviews that wait a fortnight, decisions that stall because the one person who can make them is in other meetings, and focused work that never happens because the day is cut into pieces.
Drucker's first instruction to executives was to know where their time actually goes, because it is never where they think. His second was concentration: knowledge work needs large, continuous blocks of time, and effective people do first things first, one thing at a time. 37signals built its product process on the same belief. Shape Up gives each piece of work a fixed appetite, runs it in six-week cycles followed by a cool-down, and keeps teams dedicated rather than shared.
OptionsHow organisations try to see it
| Approach | What it measures | Why it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Timesheets | Hours, after the fact | Measures the past, invites fiction, and says nothing about requests |
| FTE spreadsheets | Percentages per project | False precision; nobody knows if 0.3 of an architect is a lot |
| Resource management tools | Bookings by the hour | Heavy, and owned by a central team rather than the people involved |
| Ten slices a cycle | Agreed and requested attention | Coarse by design; the point is the pattern, not the arithmetic |
The proposalTen slices, agreed or asked
Each person's attention in a cycle is ten slices. A slice is roughly half a day a week, but nobody tracks that: the ten slices exist to make trade-offs visible, not to account for hours.
Slices come in two states. Agreed slices are promises the person has accepted. Asked slices are requests from an initiative that nobody has said yes to yet. Most planning conflict lives in the asked slices, and most plans treat them as if they were agreed. Showing them separately turns an assumption into a conversation.
Unused slices are slack, and slack is healthy. Shape Up's cool-down exists because people need time that isn't promised to anyone: to fix small things, to think, to help a colleague. A person with every slice agreed has no room for the unexpected, which always arrives.
Four patterns worth a conversation
- Over ten. Agreed and asked slices exceed the person's attention. Something already promised will slip.
- Spread across more than three initiatives. Drucker's concentration rule: fragments of attention don't add up to progress.
- Asked for by three or more initiatives. A hidden bottleneck, usually a senior specialist.
- An initiative resting on one person. More than half its agreed slices come from a single name.
LimitsWhat it is not
It is not time tracking, performance measurement or a staffing system. Slices are declared, not measured; they are only as honest as the conversation behind them. Data stays in this browser; sharing is a later step.