Where the hours go before anyone mentions AI

Memory is the wrong instrument

Ask anybody to describe their working fortnight and they will describe the parts that were difficult. The tribunal preparation, the block with the recurring leak, the resident management company (RMC) director who telephones on Sunday evenings.

Those are the memorable hours. They are not usually the expensive ones. The expensive hours are the ones nobody can recall in any detail, because each instance took four minutes and no single instance was worth writing down.

Two weeks of honest logging settles it. Not a time and motion study, and not a new system, but a shared document where people note what they did and roughly how long it took, with the categories decided afterwards rather than in advance. Deciding the categories first guarantees the answer already suspected.

What tends to come out of it

Every agent is different, and the pattern that emerges in this sector is nonetheless fairly consistent.

Correspondence is the obvious one and rarely the whole story. Underneath it sits the chase: the follow-up to a contractor who has not confirmed an appointment, the second email to the same contractor, the call to establish whether the work happened. Doing the work is not the cost. Finding out whether the work was done is the cost.

Then there is the retrieval. Somebody needs a document, and the document exists, and locating it takes 15 minutes because it might be in the property management system, the shared drive, a colleague's inbox, or the file the previous agent handed over. Multiply that across a week.

The year-end cycle compresses months of activity into a few weeks and consumes an entire team while it runs. So does the consultation calendar, which is fixed rather than optional: consultation is triggered whenever qualifying works would leave any single leaseholder contributing more than £250, or a qualifying long term agreement would cost any leaseholder more than £100 in an accounting period. That is a known administrative load with statutory consequences attached, and it arrives whether or not the week is otherwise busy.

Meetings are frequently underestimated, not because of the meeting but because of the hour before it and the hour after it. Preparation, minutes and the actions that follow are the actual expense.

And there is rework: the invoice submitted without a reference, the query answered by the wrong person, the update sent to a leaseholder who had already been told. Rework is the category most likely to be missing from the log altogether, because nobody enjoys recording it.

The part that gets skipped

Here is the awkward finding, and it turns up in businesses that have nothing else in common with each other or with property.

Most of what looks like a technology problem is a process problem wearing a technology disguise.

The retrieval difficulty is not usually an argument for software that searches faster. It is an argument for documents living in one place. The chase is not usually an argument for automated reminders. It is an argument for contractors being told, at the point of instruction, what confirmation is expected and by when. The rework is not usually an argument for anything clever at all. It is an argument for one person owning one category of query.

None of those fixes is interesting. All of them are free. And an agent who buys software before making them has bought a faster version of a process that was not working, which is how firms end up with an expensive system and the same complaint about workload.

What genuinely benefits from a machine

After the process work, a residue remains, and it is a real one.

The residue is the repetitive drafting that still has to happen even when everything upstream is in order. The status update. The acknowledgement. The summary of a long correspondence chain for somebody picking up a case. The first pass at a set of budget notes. That work does not shrink when a process is tidied, because it was never disorganised in the first place. It is simply high in volume and low in judgement, which is exactly the shape that automation suits.

The distinction is worth holding on to, because it also identifies what must stay with a person. Statutory notices, service charge demands and anything carrying a deadline with a financial consequence are not drafting tasks. They are evidence tasks, and they belong with somebody who can be held to account for them.

Doing it properly

Three habits make the exercise worth the trouble.

Log at the time rather than at the end of the day, because reconstruction smooths out precisely the small repeated items being looked for. Include everyone, including whoever insists their week is unrepresentative. And count instances alongside minutes, because 40 occurrences of a four-minute task is a different problem from one occurrence of a three-hour task, even though the totals are close.

At the end of a fortnight the result is a list. Some of it will be embarrassing. Most of it will be fixable without spending anything. What survives that filter is the genuine case for technology, and it will be narrower, more specific and considerably easier to buy against than the case anybody would have made before starting.

The demonstration will still be impressive. It will simply no longer be the thing setting the agenda.

David Bevan is the founder of HoursBack