There are not enough hours in the day.

The Institute of FishCool Studies is a think tank that I set up together with my colleagues, Happy and Lippy-2 to make our own impact on the new coalition government policy.

For the story of how we were formed, see my previous post here: http://readpole.blogspot.com/2010/10/right-wing-fish-tank.html

The IFCS team have been working on a way to improve productivity and have come up with an exciting idea to revolutionise the use of working time and improve productivity by up to 33%.

We start with the premise that the drastic public spending cuts would not need to be so severe if growth were higher.

Some people in a meeting
The crux of the issue is an intuitive truth for anyone who works in management or in an office environment, that meetings are not as productive as they could be.

There are many training courses available to help managers run meetings more effectively and get more out of meetings covering attendees, prioritisation, agenda setting, chairing and so on.

But it would not be affordable to roll out a national training programme and there is a high risk that the knowledge would not make it into practice as anyone who has attended such a course will attest.

So we started to think of how meetings tend to be scheduled in hour long slots (or multiples of) whether or not an hour is required to do the business. This practice is widespread and is really based on an arbitrary division of time into hours based on the position of the sun throughout the day or possibly based on how many finger segments we have (for a discussion on this theory see Why are there 24 hours in a day from James.lab6.com). Whatever the reason for having hours of 60 minutes, it is not based on any meaningful estimate of a good period of time for which to hold a meeting.

Sumarians making out - they could be responsible for dividing the day into 24 because they counted finger segments instead of fingers? It's 'Time' to right that wrong.

So, with our hour mapped out for us, we tend to take time to 'small talk' at the beginning of a meeting rather than getting down to business because we have plenty of time. What's worse is we might use up more time than necessary towards the end of the meeting, rather than closing the meeting down when the meeting has run it's course.

Our proposal is to increase the number of slots in a working calendar by shortening the slots from 60 minutes to 45 minutes - hence the claim of a 33% increase in productivity. After 45 minutes the quality of thinking will be deteriorating anyway and we are likely to be covering old ground. We propose it is better to move onto a new 'slot' and make sure we cover the ground in the time we have available - that's what we do with our full hours currently.

A have a colleague who has tried to shorten her meetings to 45 minutes but uses the 'spare' 15 minutes as a buffer between slots. This means they tend to be used to prepare for meetings, check emails or even as slack for the previous 45 minute meeting to run into. So there are no more decision meeting slots in the day or the week - just a bit of padding, which is potentially just waste.

Our Microsoft Outlook calendars (and similar IT systems or even paper diaries and calendars) lead meeting planners to continue the practice of booking meetings to run to the end of the hour when less time would do. There even the dividing lines in the calendar and the default time when we create a new appointment is 30 minutes - which never seems enough so we end up with an hour.

Working weeks are currently split into about 35-40 hours, about 7 or 8 per day. We propose that the working week in divided into 50 time slots of 45 minutes, that's 10 for each day. We call these time slots 'Fiddies' (after Fiddy Cent - our thanks for the name go to Twitter's @iamchads).

Fiddy - notice the wristwatch, he aint late for no meetings.

As well as offering more 'slots' to work in, this has the advantage of letting you know how far through the working week (or day) you are in the decimal units that we can understand. All we need to do is double the number (to find the semi-fiddy - 100 semi-fiddies in a week) and that is what percentage through your week you are.

Consider the following example: My PA receives a phone call from someone asking to meet me for lunch. Lunch slots are Fiddy5, Fiddy15, Fiddy25, Fiddy35 and Fiddy45. Fiddy25 gets booked - this is Wednesday lunch time exactly halfway through the week (Fiddy25 x 2 = 50 semi-fiddies = 50% of the week). You might be thinking a fiddy isn't long enough to have lunch, but we could book two, or even a number of minutes as we do currently. The important thing is that the default slot is reduced.

The fiddy system also lends itself to allocating the time in a week. If you want to aim to spend 60% of your time talking to your staff, coaching, monitoring, delegating and the like, this is 60 semi-fiddies or 30 fiddies you should book out with your people. Or it's 6 of your 10 a day.

When I put my son to bed tonight, he asked me how many hours it was until Santa came. Assuming he'd visit us at about 2am on Christmas day I estimted about 582 hours.

Then I wanted to know how many Fiddies it was. I did the ratio of 1.33 and estimated 774 fiddies until Santa came. But then I realised that this was wrong and in a moment of inspiration, I rushed back to the Institute (my study) to tell the team (my goldfish). Fiddies, we decided, should only to be used for working time. There are no fiddies in a weekend (not in mine anyway) and there are only 50 in a week. This now has the added benefit of separating the ever destructive 'work-life balance' blur. So I have 3 weeks and 3 days, only 180 Fiddies until Christmas.

Santa to visit in 180 Fiddies time (pic from NORAD).

This change will only work if it is given support by the government. It will be viewed as an infrigement of civil liberties or heavy handed dictation from the state, but the alternative is the savage spending cuts we face today, which represent far greater infringements. The government are already toying with the idea of messing with the clocks and are giving us an extra bank holiday for the Royal Wedding next year. We at the Institute for FishCool Studies are not proposing to steal any time from the people, we are giving it back.

Right Wing Fish Tank

There are two fish living in my study - they're called Happy and Lippy and we won them at a hook-a-duck stall and took them away in a plastic bag.

When we got them home, having spent £25 on the equipment to house these otherwise 'free' fish, I had an inspiring plan to get a return on my investment and have more influence over public policy with this hotch-potch of a Government, that nobody voted for, but who were about to go ballistic on the economy's ass.

Yes - I was going to set up one of these Right Wing Think Tanks that had the ear of the Government and were the source of some of the craziest ideas that were lining up to get implemented as policy. My plan was to appear Right Wing but to subvert more progressive ideas in the details. I already had the tank - now I needed the thinking.

I needed to give the fish an education and I did this by balancing my Economics text books up against the side of the tank - showing them one page per day, being careful not to rush them.

Now, I didn't think that either fish was of any particular political persuasion, more like a blank canvas waiting to be influenced and I wanted to use this to my advantage.


But then Lippy, the smaller of the two fish, started showing signs of being a bit too Party Political 'Liberal Democrat'. It came on slowly at first, Lippy would float right next to the other fish in supportive manner, as if a protege, he seemed to look up to the more confident 'Happy' but acted assertive in his own right - looking right out into the room and fighting for his turn at the food flakes. Eventually, however, the condition became critical and over a period of time Lippy went yellow, finally gave up all together and died.

Lippy was called Lippy because he had black marks around his mouth, like some kind of Goth/Punk lipstick. He belonged to my three year old daughter, so when Lippy died we opted out of the death conversation and pretended Lippy was having a sleep underneath the shell at the bottom of the tank. This 'sleep' lasted about a week, after which Lippy emerged, now slightly larger than Happy and without the lipstick. A bit like Jesus in a way - he did something with two fishes once didn't he?

Finally I could get back to my programme of creating a right wing think tank and there was no time to waste. During Lippy's sickness and 'sleeping time', we had already missed all of the Party Political Conferences, a new leader for Labour, several 'independent' reviews into Policy areas and even some leaked policies ahead of the Comprehensive Spending Review, which now loomed like an emaciated spectre in the shadows.

The new Lippy learned fast and, what was more, he kept Happy on her toes. My new dream team really got into their stride, bouncing ideas off each other, working into the wee hours of the morning. We brainstormed a mood board, developed a strategy and really got our shit together.

Pictured above - the Dream Team hold a focus group that got particularly animated!

Fortunately 'Pets at Home' had convinced us that we must have filter to clean the water, so working into the wee hours and getting our shit together was not a problem.

One morning I came down stairs, walked into the study and there on my desk was a soaking wet document - With our proud logo emblazoned on the front and the title of the report.

The Institute of FishCool Studies
What is wrong with the world Vol.1.

I have never been so proud - now I had to get it read by 'The Powers That Be'

Find out what happened next time on...
ReadPole