My day job is one most people have never heard of. I’m a workforce management consultant.
In plain English: when you call a company and sit on hold, somebody decided how many people should be answering phones at that exact moment. I teach call centers how to make that decision well. Forecasting, scheduling, and tracking where every minute of a team’s day actually goes.
It is exactly as exciting as it sounds. But it has quietly changed how I look at my own life.
So let’s do something fun. Let’s pretend you hired me, and instead of a call center, I’m auditing your week.
Step one: shrinkage
In a call center, shrinkage is all the time you’re paying people for that they aren’t available to do the actual job. Breaks, meetings, training, sick days, the guy who takes nine minutes to log into his computer every morning.
Almost every center underestimates it. When we actually measure it, the number is higher than anybody wanted to admit. Nobody is lying. They just never added it up.
Your week has shrinkage too. And I’ll go first, because mine is embarrassing.
My day job comes first. Posting to social media for my books comes second. Writing comes after that. At least, that’s the plan. In reality, other priorities take over.
Except they don’t. Doom scrolling takes over.
I’m a big multitasker. I’m on conference calls all day, making updates while I listen. I’m good at juggling. But I’ve noticed something. If I start my morning with my phone, the day just leaves. I look up and it’s gone.
And somewhere around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, I hit a wall. It doesn’t matter how much sleep I got. When I’ve been doom scrolling, my body just shuts down. It’s nasty.
Add up your own shrinkage honestly and you’ll probably find what I found. The “40 hours” you think you have for the thing that matters is closer to twelve.
Step two: build work vs. keep-the-lights-on work
Every call center has two kinds of work. There’s the work that keeps the place running: answering calls, updating records, closing tickets. And there’s the work that makes it better: fixing the process, training the team, building something new.
The first kind always wins. It’s urgent, it’s loud, and it rings. The second kind never rings. So it gets pushed to next week, every week, forever.
Your life is the same. Laundry rings. Email rings. Your phone definitely rings. Your novel, your business idea, your health? Those never ring. You have to schedule them on purpose, or they don’t happen.
Step three: adherence
A schedule is only as good as how closely people follow it. We call that adherence. You can build the perfect schedule, but if half the team takes lunch whenever they feel like it, the whole thing falls apart by 11:30.
Here’s the trick most people miss: when adherence is bad, the answer usually isn’t yelling at people. It’s building a schedule they can actually keep.
So here’s my rule now, and it’s simple. Write before you scroll.
Some mornings it’s hard. Grabbing the phone is the first thing almost all of us do. But it’s a waste of the best hours I’ve got.
Don’t get me wrong. I love social media. We learn from it. We’re entertained by it. But we rarely do anything with it. We just take it in.
Here’s what I’ve noticed. If you added up every video you watched in a week, I’d bet a good chunk of them are ones you’ve already seen. Same videos, same creators, same jokes. And the familiarity feels good. It’s warm and cozy, like a blanket you never want to get out from under.
Break it up. Put the words on the page first. The blanket will still be there when you’re done.
Step four: don’t run at 100 percent
One of the first things I tell new clients surprises them. You don’t want your people busy 100 percent of the time. When every minute is spoken for, one long call wrecks the whole afternoon, and burnout shows up right on schedule.
Healthy teams leave room. So should you. If your calendar has zero slack, you don’t have a schedule. You have a countdown to a meltdown.
Your audit
Take one week and track it like I would:
- Measure your shrinkage. Write down where your time actually goes, not where you think it goes. Check your phone’s screen time report. Brace yourself.
- Label everything build or maintain. Then count how many hours were build.
- Do one build thing before you touch your phone. Small and kept beats big and skipped.
- Leave some slack. Life is going to call. Have someone available to answer.
My consulting fee for this audit is normally a lot more than free. You’re welcome.
There’s always a story under the story.
If this one stuck with you, I’ll send the next one straight to your inbox.