Other shapes
Choosing a shape by what you cannot remove
The arrangement that fits is determined by two counts made before any of this starts: what cannot stop, and how many things could.
The Friday clean-down of the workshopThe removal a compressed week cannot make
week 9 · crept back after 22 weeks
A named person on the phone until sixThe removal staggered cover is designed to avoid
week 7 · crept back after 5 weeks
Visits to the two furthest sitesThe removal a nine-day fortnight makes instead
week 7 · asked back after 12 weeks
Crept back 2Asked back 1
Three removals were written down with the week each of them stopped. Every one of them produced an event inside the 78 weeks watched. Of these, one was asked back and two crept back. Three removals that a different shape of week would have handled differently.
The usual way of choosing between these arrangements is to ask what people would like. That is a reasonable input and it is not the constraint.
The constraint is arithmetic and it is knowable in advance, from two counts that take an afternoon.
Count one: what cannot stop
List the obligations that continue regardless of how the week is arranged — cover at times set by other people, deliveries, statutory dates, anything where the requirement is a presence rather than a quantity of work.
For each, record how many people can meet it today.
On this record there were three obligations and the whole team could meet all of them. That is a light load, and it is why the four-day week was available at all.
Count two: how many things could stop
Go through the week and list the procedures that are not the work itself: the reviews, the circulations, the logs, the standing slots, the duplicates. Do not judge them. Count them.
On this record there were thirty-eight, in an organisation of about ninety people that had not examined its procedures for roughly twenty years.
That number is the capacity for reduction, and it is not proportional to headcount. A place that has recently been through a process review, or that is small enough for everybody to see everything, will have a much shorter list.
Putting the two together
| cannot stop | could stop | arrangement that fits |
|---|---|---|
| light | long list | four-day week |
| light | short list | nine-day fortnight |
| heavy | long list | nine-day fortnight, staggered |
| heavy | short list | compressed hours, or nothing |
| cyclical | either | annualised hours |
The table is crude and the logic behind it is not.
A long list and light obligations is the only combination where a full four-day week is comfortable. The hours can be found by removal and nobody has to carry extra cover. This record.
A short list means the reduction must come from procedures that are load-bearing, because there are no others. Attempting eight hours against twelve candidates means removing things that matter, and the failures will not be of the slow invisible kind documented here — they will be ordinary, fast and obvious, which is a different and in some ways easier problem.
Heavy obligations make the common day off expensive, because somebody absorbs it. Staggering keeps the pool intact at the cost of the shared day.
Heavy obligations and a short list is the combination where there is no reduction available, and compressed hours is the arrangement that offers something — a free day, no reduction, the costs falling on the length of the day rather than on anything the organisation does.
The sentence that is usually skipped
There is a fifth answer, which is that none of them fits, and it deserves to be on the table rather than reached by exhaustion.
An organisation with heavy fixed obligations, a short list of removable procedures and no cyclical shape to its demand is being asked to reduce hours with no mechanism for doing it. The reduction, if attempted, comes out of coverage, out of the margin that absorbs problems, or out of a small group of people.
Saying so early is cheaper than finding out at month nine, and the two counts above are what make it sayable with something behind it.
What the counts do not tell you
They do not tell you which removals are safe. Nothing does, which is the point of the rest of this site.
They tell you whether the arrangement is arithmetically available, and that is a genuinely different question from whether it is a good idea — a question this record cannot answer for anybody else, and does not try to.
What this record does say is that the organisation with thirty-eight candidates and three light obligations got a shorter week, recovered more hours than its own count suggested, and paid for it with five problems it found out about between fourteen and sixty-four weeks later. That is the shape of the trade. The counts above tell you whether you are in a position to make it.
Counting candidates without judging them
The second count is the one people get wrong, and the error is always in the same direction.
Asked to list procedures that could stop, most teams list things they dislike. The list that matters is different: everything that is not the work itself, whether or not anybody minds it.
The distinction is operational. A count of things people dislike tells you about morale and produces a short list, because most procedures are tolerated rather than resented. A count of everything that is not the work tells you about capacity and produces a long one — on this record, thirty-eight in an organisation of ninety.
The instruction that works is mechanical: go through a week and write down every activity that does not directly produce the thing the organisation is for. Reviews, circulations, logs, counts, duplicates, standing slots, reminders, records. Do not ask whether any of them should stop; that question comes later and it ruins the count.
The number produced is the capacity for reduction. On this record it was thirty-eight, and the thing worth knowing in advance is that roughly a third of any such list will turn out to have been doing nothing at all.