Reframing time
Sometimes we trick ourselves into believing that time is concrete, inflexible, and finite. After all, time is the passing of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. Once a minute passes, you can't get it back. I am one of those people who perceive time as abstract, flexible, and infinite. But time sure feels finite when my project is late and getting later.

I would like to offer a different way of framing time. We may not know how to get time back once it passes, but consider the temporal effects when we change how we choose to spend time. It is possible to get more time from our time by using substitutes for time, paradoxical as that may seem.

An example
Consider this substitute for time: slowing down. You may have experienced that rushing sometimes results in more defects, which in turn take more time to fix. Slowing down may seem counterintuitive when you are under pressure, but try reframing it as avoiding wasted time from fixing defects caused by going too fast.

As an example, Team A and Team B are each given the same 4 hours to make a simple product. The product must be defect-free. All aspects of both teams are very similar such that neither team has an advantage or disadvantage. Team A works at a very fast pace to make its product, and finishes in 3.5 hours. Team A then begins to fix the three defects in its finished product. Each defect takes 1/2 hour to fix. Total time for Team A to make a defect-free product is 5 hours.

Team B starts out at the same pace as Team A, then consciously slows down the pace. At the end of 4 hours, Team B has just finished making its product. Team B's product has one defect. That defect takes 1/2 hour to fix. Total time for Team B to make a defect-free product is 4.5 hours.

The net temporal effect of slowing down is that Team B has 1/2 hour to use at its discretion.

Substitutes for time
My partner, Eileen, and I made decks of cards to give away as gifts to clients. Each deck had 26 cards, each with a different substitute for time printed on it. We included six blank "wild" cards. The wild cards were included so that the owner of the deck could add his or her own substitutes for time. Here are the cards currently in each deck.

Focus can be a substitute for time. When my time is split among several projects' tasks (e.g., 20% on project x, 50% on project y, 30% on project z), some time and focus will be lost as I switch between those projects. A rule of thumb Jerry Weinberg (Quality Software Management, vol. 1, Systems Thinking, Dorset House, New York: 1992) uses when estimating the effects of splitting tasks is shown in the following table:

Task Splitting

Focusing on fewer tasks will reduce the startup and shutdown time you spend switching between tasks.