How much is admin really costing you? Run the 20-minute count

Ask an owner where their week goes and you'll get the honest answer: they don't know. They're not hiding anything. The work that eats the week just doesn't look like work. It looks like Tuesday.

It's 4pm on a Tuesday. Three invoices haven't gone out. A client is waiting on an answer that's been sitting in the inbox since 9am. The same job details get typed into a second system because the first one doesn't talk to the second. Nobody planned any of this. No meeting was held about it. It just happens, every day, to everyone.

That's the loop this post is about: invisible admin. The chasing, retyping, formatting and copying between tools that never appears on a to-do list but takes the afternoon anyway.

The maths (a sketch, not a client figure)

Put editable assumptions on it and the number gets loud fast:

• 30 minutes a day of retyping, chasing and copying between tools (a conservative guess for most teams of 2 to 10. Some days it's zero, some days it's two hours)
• × 5 days = 2.5 hours a week
• × £30 an hour (what an owner's or office manager's hour is actually worth) = £75 a week
• × 46 working weeks = £3,450 a year. Per person.

A team of five doing the same shuffle? Roughly £17,000 a year. A salary's worth of work, spent moving information from where it landed to where it's needed.

Swap in your own minutes and your own rate. The shape of the number doesn't change.

Score it: the three checks

Before handing anything over, score the task on the same three checks we use everywhere:

• Hours. How much of the week it eats (0 to 5)
• Repeat. Could a new starter follow it from one page? (0 to 5)
• Risk-if-wrong. If it slips once, how bad? (0 to 5. High means it's safe to hand over, because the rules are obvious)

Take "retyping job details between tools" as the example. It eats about 2 hours a week (3). A new starter could follow it from a single page (4). A slip is annoying but recoverable (3). Verdict: worth handing over. The inbox triage that decides which client gets a refund, by contrast: low hours (1), not writable on one page (1). Human-only, leave it alone.

Three checks at 4 or more, hand it over. Two, start narrow, one step. One or less, leave it with a person.

Try one thing this week (free)

Run the 20-minute count. Today or Monday:

1. Set a timer for 20 minutes.
2. From memory, list what repeated last week: chasing, retyping, formatting, copying between tools, hunting for a file or a reply.
3. Put rough minutes on each. Add it up. × your hourly rate × 46 weeks.

Judge the number on Friday. If it's smaller than you feared, you've bought certainty cheaply. If it's bigger, you now know exactly which loop to look at first, and it's usually the one you wrote down first.

Where a person stays

Software should prepare. A person should decide. An automation can assemble the invoice, draft the chase email, move the details between systems. But the send button, the judgement call, the awkward conversation: those stay human. Anything that hands over the deciding along with the typing is a leak wearing a fix.

FAQ