Weekly review and planning loop time saved

Benchmark range

Lower bound: 1 hours. Median value: 1.5 hours. Upper bound: 2.5 hours.

Measurement period: per week, net of the review itself.

Methodology

Triangulated from six public sources, two of them peer-reviewed, none of which measures this skill. Mechanism evidence: Buehler, Griffin and Ross found students predicted 33.9 days to finish an honours thesis but took 55.5 days, a 1.64 to 1 overrun with only 29.7% finishing on their predicted date, which is why the plan is sized against an explicit ceiling with a buffer rather than against self-estimates; Harkin and colleagues' meta-analysis of 138 randomised studies with 19,951 participants found progress monitoring improved goal attainment at d+ = 0.40, with larger effects when progress was reported rather than private, which is what writing the log entry does; Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano and Staats found 15 minutes of daily reflection produced 22.8% better performance on a final test than continuing to work. Capacity evidence: Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index reports 57% of work time spent communicating, Asana's 2022 Anatomy of Work Index reports 58% of the workday on work about work, and Harvard Business Review reports collaborative work consuming 85% or more of the workweek - together establishing that the hours available for planned commitments are a small remainder that must be counted rather than assumed. CaseLedger deliberately does not convert the 22.8% performance figure or the d+ = 0.40 effect size into a time saving, because a training-test gain and a standardised mean difference across heterogeneous goal studies do not transfer to a knowledge worker's week. The published range of 1 to 2.5 hours is set at 2.5% to 6% of a 40-hour week, an order of magnitude below the reflection figure, and the 30 minutes the review itself takes is subtracted from it.

Cited sources: 6. Measurement period: per week, net of the review itself.

Original sources

• Exploring the Planning Fallacy: Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion Times

  Buehler, Griffin and Ross, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

  In the honours-thesis study, students predicted 33.9 days to completion but actually took 55.5 days, a ratio of 1.64 to 1, and only 29.7% finished by the date they predicted.

• Does Monitoring Goal Progress Promote Goal Attainment? A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence

  Harkin et al., Psychological Bulletin

  A meta-analysis of 138 randomised studies with 19,951 participants found that prompting people to monitor progress toward a goal improved goal attainment with an average effect size of d+ = 0.40, and that effects were larger when progress was reported publicly than kept private.

• Reflecting on Work Improves Job Performance

  Harvard Business School Working Knowledge

  In the Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano and Staats field experiment, workers who spent the last 15 minutes of each training day reflecting on what they had learned performed 22.8% better on the final test than a control group that kept working.

• Collaboration Overload Is Sinking Productivity

  Harvard Business Review

  Harvard Business Review reports that collaborative work such as email, instant messaging, phone and video calls had grown to consume 85% or more of most people's workweeks.

• Will AI Fix Work? - Work Trend Index Annual Report

  Microsoft Work Trend Index

  Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index reports employees spend 57% of work time communicating rather than creating, and 62% struggle with time spent searching for information during the workday.

• Anatomy of Work Index 2022

  Asana

  Asana's 2022 Anatomy of Work Index reports workers spend 58% of the workday on work about work, and managers spend 62% of their workdays on it.