You block off three hours on Saturday to finally get that project done.
You get maybe ninety minutes.
Somebody needs a ride. The dog gets out. You spend twenty minutes finding the file you were sure was on the desktop. By the time you actually sit down, half the afternoon is gone, and you feel like a failure for not finishing something you never really had time for.
Call centers have a word for this. They call it shrinkage.
What shrinkage means
In workforce management, which is what I teach for a living, shrinkage is the share of paid time when an agent isn’t available to take calls. Breaks. Lunch. Meetings. Training. Coaching. Sick days. Vacation. Technical problems. The system going down at 10:15 on a Monday.
It’s not wasted time. Most of it is necessary. But it’s time that’s not available for the main job.
In a lot of centers, shrinkage runs as high as a third of all scheduled time.
So a center that needs 100 agents on the phones at noon doesn’t schedule 100 people. It schedules around 150, because it knows a third of them won’t be available at any given moment.
You’re scheduling with zero shrinkage
Most of us plan our own time like shrinkage doesn’t exist. Three hours on the calendar means three hours of work in our heads. Then real life takes its third, and we blame ourselves.
A call center that scheduled that way would miss its service level every single day. Customers would sit on hold forever. And the managers would be completely baffled, because on paper they had plenty of people.
That’s you on Saturday afternoon.
My fifteen-minute plumbing job
My most recent example isn’t about writing. It’s about plumbing.
A few days ago I found a water leak. Annoying, but I checked the meter and it wasn’t spinning, so I figured it was a pinhole leak, not a flood-the-yard emergency. I went to the hardware store, bought the parts, and planned to knock it out Saturday morning in the daylight.
Amber had plans that morning and asked if I was coming with her.
Nope. I had to fix that leak. It was a fifteen-minute job, so it should only take me two hours.
That was a joke. It was also a schedule. Without thinking about it, I’d already built in my own shrinkage. I padded a fifteen-minute job by eight times.
I was still wrong.
Right as I was fixing the leak, the water company pulled up. They’d noticed the leak too, and that I’d been getting my water free. My meter wasn’t spinning because it hadn’t spun in weeks. There’s no telling how long that leak had been running.
So they put in a new meter. And the new meter needed a new fitting. Back to the store. Twenty miles of driving for a 72-cent connector, and one more hour.
My fifteen-minute job that would take two hours got finished just before Amber pulled back into the driveway. Thankfully she brought lunch, because it was three hours later and I was starving.
What started as a joke went exactly like I planned. Longer.
Notice what ate the time. It wasn’t laziness. It was a broken meter I didn’t know about, a truck I didn’t expect, and a part I couldn’t have known I’d need. None of that was visible when I made the plan. That’s what shrinkage is. The stuff you can’t see from the start line.
How to plan like a call center
- Measure first. For one week, write down what you planned and what really happened. Don’t judge it. Just count.
- Plan for the loss. If your shrinkage is a third, and you need two hours of real work, schedule three.
- Shrink the shrinkage you control. Some of it is life. Some of it is the twenty minutes you spend looking for the file. Fix the second kind.
- Stop calling it failure. Getting ninety minutes out of three hours isn’t you being lazy. It might just be normal.
The best call centers aren’t the ones where nothing goes wrong. They’re the ones that expected it to.
Your calendar can work the same way.
The first one in this series: If I Ran Your Calendar Like a Call Center.
There’s always a story under the story.
If this one stuck with you, I’ll send the next one straight to your inbox.