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.

Accountants have sex, dance and skydive.

Britain's Got Talent and Nobody Nobody.
As a finance professional, I was very upset to see the way that Britains Got Talent (BGT) contestant, Mr Nobody Nobody, was portrayed.

I have forgotten his name already (so have included a picture of an egg) but he was bald and sang and worked as an accountant. On BGT at that time, being an accountant was the worst job in the world.

Since Mr Nobody didn't have enough personal tragedy on his life to set to a Westlife ballad, they had to exagerate how desparately unhappy he would be if he had to go back to accountancy. This is shit. The stable office job would have offered Mr N a great opportunity to dabble in singing if that was his first love.

It is not a massive tragedy to be in a job that doesn't allow you to live your dream - it's just normal. Compared to the day jobs most of the losers on the show had, Mr N was pretty lucky, at least he didn't have to hawk himself round stinking clubs for beans like some of those contestants who were trying to live their 'dream', but who would never quite make it. What can they do if Simon gives the thumbs down?Nothing but fizzle out with no money and a broken dream. But Mr N, he's got something to fall back on, just like all our parents advised us to have.

(The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making you think you needed his approval, when you already had the approval of Amanda and Peirs).

I really hope that Mr N was just playing the media game and that he realised that he was doing okay. Apart from all that, many finance jobs are quite interesting - honest.

Setting the Record Straight
Recently I had a chance to set the record straight about the potential excitingness of accountants, when I attended a seminar on Advanced Communication Skills - I know, I'm not doing much to turn the tide of opinion so far.

The train that got me there in good time was cancelled. The guy behind the ticket selling window was very unapologetic - but I didn't make a fuss as the next train would get me there just about on time.

After some confusion about where I had to change and which route was best to take, I eventually arrived with two minutes to grab a coffee before it started.

[yes I know, describing travel is not the most exciting thing either - but bear with me].

My colleague was there too, she had decided to take the same course, we didn't think we were too rubbish at communicating but this was 'advanced communication skills' which sounded interesting. [well considering we were getting paid, stay seated].

Because I was late, most of the other delegates had a chance to meet each other and were seated at round tables of four to six people. My friend and I sat at an empty table further away from the front.

The guy who showed us in seemed concerned that we were a bit of a small group, but we were about to start so he said perhaps we could each join a another group when the trainer started some group work.

This sounded like a good plan, we already knew each other and we'd get more out of this if we split up. I started scanning round for which group I would go to when the time came. [gripping stuff eh?]

Now I like talking to women about ten times more than talking to men. I used to silently object to this theory when my mother used to point it out when I was a teenager, but over the years I came to realise how very true it was. Mother knows best!

I don't know why I did object, perhaps I thought it could mean I was effeminate or some kind of cadish womaniser, but I suppose it was just a case of being told what you are, making you automatically wonder what you are not. In this case, I am not a 'man's man'. Come to think of it I probably would have felt more of an objection if I had been labelled a man's man.

Three tables were near enough for us to join without looking weird, there were two groups of six and one with four people.

The table of four was the obvious choice but they were all men. I didn't want to join them for that reason alone. The other tables were mixed, which was better, but were already quite full.

I justified in my mind that my friend would have to go on 'blokey' table because (A) she was nearer to it, by two foot and (B) it would make that one a more 'diverse' group.

A little way into the first session a woman came in late and joined our table, I immediately scrapped the table hopping plan, how could we leave her on a table on her own? That would just be weird now.

The first group discussions happened, we were supposed to be thinking of an example of how we could have used language better in our work, or home life using what we had learned.

The trainer went round the tables with people feeding back interesting and varied examples from retail, manufacturing and the dinner tables of life. Until the spokesman for 'blokey' table shared that their group had realised that all four of them were accounants and had got sidetracked into reminising about the day they cracked double entry book keeping!

I overheard someone from another table mutter "I'm glad I wasn't on that table" and I could take it no more. I had to save the reputation of the accounting profession.

I promptly stood up on my table and got my cock out and sang Maria. But not the sappy West Side Story Maria that Mr N had chosen, I went for Blondie's Maria. It's hard to see what else I could have done, although perhaps in hindsight I should have mentioned that I too was an accountant. I was just too embarassed to admit it.

So if you ever find yourself thinking accountancy is boring, just try to picture me up on that table, swinging my mic around and around.

And smile at your accountants, they want to have sex, dance and skydive too. And when you're not looking they do.