Most lost time is waiting, not working
Measure a task from raised to finished and the working part is usually the smallest slice. The rest is waiting to be picked up, waiting to be chased, and being re-explained after it changed hands. Those three are what TaskIt is aimed at.
No timers, timesheets or activity monitoring.
The problems this page is about
If none of these describe your week, a different page on this site probably does.
How it goes today
Work sits in a queue nobody can see
A task assigned to one busy person waits for that person. Nobody else knows it exists, so nobody else can take it — and the waiting does not show up anywhere.
Half of management is chasing
Asking for updates is the manual substitute for a status field. It interrupts the person being asked, produces an estimate rather than a fact, and has to be repeated tomorrow.
Context is rebuilt at every transfer
Each time work changes hands the incoming person reconstructs what the outgoing one already knew. That reconstruction is invisible in every report and expensive in every week.
The same routine is re-created by hand
Fifteen recurring jobs retyped every week is an hour that produces nothing new, and slightly different lists each time.
With TaskIt
Shorten the wait before pickup
Department queues let the first free person take the work instead of it waiting for one named individual. Time to accept — the gap between raising and taking on — is measured, so you can see whether it improved.
Make chasing unnecessary
Status, progress, due dates, blocked reasons and the whole activity timeline are already on the task. The dashboard, the board and the reports answer the questions a stand-up was for.
Stop re-explaining at handover
A handover records completed work, pending work, notes and progress on the same task ID. The incoming person reads instead of interviewing.
Delete the clerical hour
Recurring schedules raise repeating work automatically, notifications go out as part of creating the task, and daily, weekly or monthly reports are generated and delivered on schedule.
Rebalance from evidence
Workload shows what each person is actually holding, and the four timing averages show whether the constraint is pickup, execution or approval — which are three completely different fixes.
Finding out where the week actually goes
One department’s figures after a month, and what each one means.
- 1
Time to accept: 4 hours
Work waits half a day before anyone picks it up. This is queueing, and it is usually the largest and most fixable slice.
- 2
Completion time: 90 minutes
Once started, the work is quick. Capability is not the constraint, so pressure on the team would achieve nothing.
- 3
Turnaround: 6 hours
What the requester experienced. The gap between this and completion time is almost entirely queue.
- 4
The change
Route that work to the department rather than to a named person, and switch on WhatsApp notification to the team group.
- 5
The following month
Time to accept is the number to watch. Nothing about how fast anyone works needed to change.
The result
The productivity gain came from removing a wait, which is the kind of gain a team does not resent.
The result
No percentages, because nothing here has measured yours — these are the changes the mechanism produces.
Less time between raising work and starting it
A visible queue with several eligible people is the most direct lever on the largest slice of elapsed time.
Fewer meetings that exist to collect information
When the state of the work is already readable, the meeting either becomes about decisions or stops being needed.
Handovers that cost minutes rather than a morning
The five fields a handover requires are the five things the next person would otherwise have to ask for.
Measurements people can argue with
Every figure is a subtraction between two real timestamps, so a disagreement about a number is resolvable by looking at the records behind it.
Frequently asked questions
No. It measures elapsed time between recorded events — created, accepted, started, completed — which is not the same as effort. There is no timer, timesheet or effort log anywhere in the product, and a task left over a weekend has a long turnaround without anyone having been slow.
That depends far more on how the figures are used than on the figures themselves. Nothing here monitors screens, keystrokes or hours. The measurements are about the work — how long it waited, how long it took, how often it changed hands — and they are most useful for finding process problems rather than people problems.
Usually two things: route ad-hoc work to a department queue instead of a named person, and switch on the notification for task creation. Together they attack acceptance time, which is normally the biggest single slice of elapsed time.
A few weeks of real work. The four averages only include tasks where both timestamps exist, so a small sample is a small sample — the figures are honest about that rather than filling gaps with zeros.
Where to go next
The capabilities behind this page, and the neighbouring situations they also cover.
Find your largest wait
A month of real work is enough for acceptance time and turnaround to tell you where the week is actually going.