No, a year is not equivalent to 365 days (that is, project-wise).
I hope that through the title I already have your attention: it´s a bold statement, I know. Still, my point is not driven from a post holidays´ bad hangover or an astronomical delusion. Because yes, the 2021 gregorian calendar has 360 days to go (five gone by now), but this is more sort of a reminder, a call for awareness for decision makers, namely C-Suite, Executives, Managers, PMs etc. now that we are opening the 2021 cycle. In the following paragraphs I´ll explain myself, so bear with me.
For starters, unless your projects run in the same way as your operations (24×7), we are tricking ourselves from the very beginning of our planning exercise: most of us have a deep, almost subconscious assumption (sort of a collective verbal agreement) that concurs that the project has 365 days per year to exploit. Well, that is normally not the case. Let´s start with the ends, I mean the weekends. I have done some research (my data sources are Wikipedia and ourworldindata.org) and assuming Saturdays and Sundays are off and 52 weeks per year in average, then we got 104 days less. After adding the average number of paid holidays (11 is a rounded average worldwide, 13 is the mode), the result is that we loose about 34% of the year calendar days due to weekends and holidays. That leaves us with approx. 240 days to go. Still, if we examine this count from a realistic perspective, we must consider that the last weeks of the year are quite low productive, as the first one usually is. So I dare to say that the real result of this initial filtering exercise leaves us with about 230 or 225 days to produce whatever deliverables are expected. But wait, there is more…
The aforementioned 225 available days need to have paid vacations deducted as well. Now, leave-time varies a lot across countries & legislations. Let´s again use statistics as our allies: world average paid-day vacations based on a five-days work week is 16, and the mode is 20 (source: Wikipedia, these final aggregated numbers were calculated by Fernando). So now we are down to about 205 days to work. Is this the magic number? No, there is always a catch
The 205 days are also a mirage: this number is not accounting for sick, grief and other type of leaves, not to mention travelling days if your endeavor implies such needs. So at the end, I believe we have circa 200 days to go per individual, per calendar year. For the sake of keeping it short & sweet, I am not going in detail about historical trends on leave days. Let´s just mention that diminishing working hours is a historical fact and that 4 days work week is one of the big topics of our time: “experiments” on this idea are happening as we speak. All that being said, and for the peace of your minds, the translation of the work days into work hours provides some relief, especially now that work-from-home is ubiquitous and extended working hours are a new normality: to what extent this simultaneous trend counters/balances the day availability reduction is yet to be assessed as the post-COVID era matures.
As a conclusion, I want to leave you with three ideas in mind: first, if your projects run on a 5 work days week basis, you have in fact about 200 work days per year to go (in other words, you loose 45% upfront!). Secondly, if time is of the essence (and according to my experience, it always is) we should consider for budget to work during Saturdays and/or double or triple shifts and/or a follow-the-sun tactic. A buffer for delays should be embedded into the plan as well. And then last but not least: at the end, our results depend not so much on calendars but on productivity. The point is simple: one truly devoted, focused hour – not to mention a day of undivided attention – produces more relevant outcomes than hours of “multitasking” and mediocre efforts. So let´s strive to be human and deal with one thing at a time – the correct one, the current priority – with all our capabilities and skill in this brand new 2021.
My sincere best wishes to you and your kin, may this new cycle around our star be more productive, focused, happy and healthy for all Humankind.
Fernando
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
