The Honest Clock

The first proper YouTube video I made took nearly a month. This was somewhat embarrassing because I had been making films for years, which gave me the slightly unfortunate self-confidence that I knew what I was doing.

It didn't take a month to make I should say, and that's the interesting part.

The actual filming and editing probably amounted to a week or two, scattered around the usual domestic commitments of having a family, a job and a life in which nobody really is too bothered whether the angle is just right on the opening scene.

The rest of the month was waiting.

The script was finished, but I hadn't filmed it because the light wasn't quite right, or so I told myself. I had filmed some of it, but hadn't looked at the footage because the edit felt like a mountain, so it sat on the SD card for a while. The rough cut existed, but sat on my computer for several days while I told myself I was letting it settle.

It wasn't settling. I was avoiding finishing it. This distinction turned out to be rather important. At the time, if you'd asked me how long it took to make a YouTube video, I would have said, "About a month."

It was a perfectly reasonable answer in some respects, and completely wrong. A month wasn't the duration of the work. It was the distance between the idea and the moment somebody else could finally experience it.

You'll notice the same thing everywhere. A proposal that takes three hours to write but sits in someone's inbox for twelve days. A decision that could be made before lunch but waits for the next meeting, next week.

A product that takes six weeks to build and six months to get through the machinery surrounding it. A book that is ninety per cent finished for nine months. A brilliant idea that has been sitting in a notebook since 2022.

We tend to describe these things by the amount of work involved. But work isn't the same thing as waiting, or delayed, or held up, or blocked, or just not being done.

And the waiting is where the interesting story is.

There is a useful name for this distance: cycle time.

It sounds like something that ought to live on a dashboard beside utilisation and defect rates, and in many companies it probably does – which is perhaps why people have managed to make it sound considerably duller than it actually is.

Cycle time is simply the time it takes for something to move from one meaningful state to another. Idea to published. Request to resolved. Proposal to decision. Draft to finished. First conversation to signed agreement.

It includes the work, but it also includes everything that happens when the work isn't happening. That is what makes it useful.

We are rather good at measuring activity. How many things did we do? How many hours did we spend? How many tickets did we close? How many meetings did we have? How many hours did people work?

The clock however, is interested in a different question.

How long did it take to get the thing to the person who could actually use it?

That is a much more revealing question. Because somewhere between the beginning and the end there will usually be a queue, or a delay, or some friction. Someone waiting for someone else. Someone waiting for permission. Someone waiting for information. Someone waiting until they feel ready. Someone waiting for a meeting. Someone waiting for Tuesday. Someone waiting for the perfect plan.

And this is where cycle time gets interesting. It isn't really about speed. It is about flow.

You can have a very fast organisation that is terrible at getting anything useful to the outside world. Lots of people working furiously hard, lots of green status indicators, lots of activity, lots of rapid movement – and an idea sitting in the middle of it all waiting for somebody to press the button, or tick the box, or speak to Dave.

Conversely, a little waiting can be exactly what the work needs. I know this because of the videos. Some of mine genuinely needed another day. There was a joke that became better after I'd slept on it. A piece of footage that looked ordinary until I found the right way to cut it.

You don't want to eliminate that. You want to eliminate the other kind. The dead time. The avoidance. The hesitance. The perfecting a plan. The unnecessary hand-off. The mysterious approval from floor 4. The task nobody owns. The thing that has become stuck simply because everybody has got used to it being stuck.

The clock doesn't know the difference. It doesn't care. It just keeps going. The clock is wonderfully uninterested in our explanations for why things aren't flowing.

The spread tells the story

The average is useful, but variation is where things get really interesting. Suppose something usually takes three days. Now suppose it sometimes takes three weeks. That's the bit I'd want to investigate.

Why? Because the outlier is often showing you something the average is hiding.

My own video history became almost comic when I started looking at it this way. Some things went from idea to published in a week. Others pottered around for months. The long ones weren't necessarily harder. Often they were simply the ones I was more uncertain about.

One particularly difficult piece found a remarkable number of hiding places. I re-recorded things that didn't need re-recording. I changed the thumbnail. I changed it back. I watched the opening twenty seconds about 400 times. I decided to "sleep on it".

The work wasn't taking four months. I was. And there is something useful about discovering that. Because once you can see where the time, energy and attention goes, you can do something about it.

The same thing happens in organisations, only with more people available to blame. A piece of work waits for a sign-off from somebody three levels away who has never seen the detail. A dependency sits with another team whose definition of urgent is vastly different from yours. A decision waits because being wrong feels personally dangerous, while doing nothing feels pleasantly neutral.

One person becomes the gateway through which everything must pass. A meeting is scheduled for three weeks from now because nobody has asked whether the decision can simply be made right now.

None of these things necessarily look ridiculous from inside the system. They are just how things are done. But the clock has a different opinion.

The clock says: this took twenty-three days. That's pretty tough to argue with.

Don't worship the clock

There is, however, a trap here. The moment you make cycle time a target, you've probably ruined the interesting bit.

This happens all the time in business. We find something useful to observe, put a number beside it, give somebody a target and then act surprised when human beings begin optimising for the number.

Make "reduce cycle time" the objective and eventually someone will discover that the easiest way to make the number smaller is to make the work worse. Skip the useful conversation. Remove the thoughtful review. Ship something half-finished.

Stop experimenting. Move difficult work somewhere the clock doesn't measure it. Congratulations. The dashboard looks good, everyone's delighted. But value creation has gone with it, and so to a few customers too.

This is why I think cycle time is much more interesting as a question than a target.

Where is the work waiting? Why is it waiting? Is the waiting useful? Who or what is it waiting for? What would happen if we removed it?

And perhaps the most important question:

What kind of waiting are we looking at?

Because sometimes waiting is thinking. Sometimes it is incubation and pondering. Sometimes it is caution. Sometimes it is simply the fear of being wrong passed off as professionalism. Those things all look identical on a timeline.

They aren't.

The point isn't to make everything instantaneous and remove all delays and waiting. The point is to know which delays are bringing you something useful and which are simply costing you money, time, energy and attention.

The fifty-day problem

I once measured the cycle time of recruitment in a company I was working with – from first contact to offer or rejection. The answer was around fifty days.

Fifty days is a long time to leave a human being in the mix of trying to get a job. So we looked and found there wasn't one enormous problem, there were dozens of little gaps and delays.

An unnecessary step here. A decision without a clear owner there. An approval that existed because somebody had created it, and nobody quite knew why. A diary problem. A hand-off. Another hand-off. Another diary issue. Another hand-off. Someone being asked to review something they didn't really need to review.

The system had accumulated waiting. We removed a lot of it and the cycle time came down to around ten days.

Nothing heroic happened. Nobody invented a revolutionary recruitment methodology. We didn't announce a transformation plan, and we certainly didn't commission a report. We simply looked at the road between two points and noticed that there were quite a lot of parked cars, sharp turns, wrong turns and one ways.

The benefits weren't limited to speed either. Good candidates stopped disappearing while we were still arranging our internal processes. People spent less time chasing things. The experience became less frustrating. The organisation became more capable of responding while an opportunity was still an opportunity.

The fifty days weren't merely slow. They were expensive. Money, certainly. But also attention, energy, goodwill and opportunity.

Those costs are much harder to find in the accounts.

Your notebook is a queue

I eventually got that month to create a video down to days.

Not because I became a spectacularly disciplined content creator. I didn't discover the secret morning routine of successful YouTubers. I certainly didn't start waking at 5am to journal beside a glass of lemon water followed by goat yoga. I simply started noticing the distance.

Where was the idea? Where was the next piece of work? What was I waiting for? What was I avoiding? What needed thinking about and what merely needed doing?

Once I could see those things, the work became much easier to move.

This is what I like about cycle time. It gives you a way of looking at work without immediately turning it into a productivity contest. It doesn't ask whether you are working hard enough, we all likely are. It asks how the idea and value is travelling. And how it isn't.

An idea in a notebook is not a failure. A draft waiting for the right moment is not necessarily a failure. A decision that takes a little longer because it matters is not a failure. But if something has been waiting for three months because nobody knows who gets to say yes, that is worth knowing.

If a customer is waiting because an internal approval chain is optimised for management reporting and not the customer, that is worth knowing. If your best idea is still in the notebook because you are frightened of discovering whether it is any good, that is worth knowing too.

The clock doesn't judge any of this. It simply records the distance and time. And sometimes that is enough.

Because once you can see the distance between an idea and its value, you can start asking better questions about what is happening in between.

You can remove some things. Protect others. Make a decision. Change an arrangement. Improve a process. Create a better climate. Make the next step obvious. Give somebody permission to finish. Or, occasionally, admit that you are the bottleneck. That last one is surprisingly liberating.

The honest clock doesn't tell you to hurry and move fast and break things. It tells you the truth about how long the journey actually takes. And there is something wonderfully useful about knowing that.

Because every day an idea spends stuck somewhere is a day in which nobody gets to experience what it might become.

The goal isn't to make the clock go faster. It's to make sure that when it is running, it is taking something somewhere. Now, where did I put that SD card from two months ago?