Time management: simplify before adding another method?
Time management initiatives readily add to existing practices: extra dashboards, new routines and more frequent monitoring. The managerial question is more precise: before adding another mechanism, do we genuinely consider removing a step without compromising the outcome?
What the literature establishes
Gabrielle S. Adams, Benjamin A. Converse, Andrew H. Hales and Leidy E. Klotz (2021, Nature) show across a series of experiments that participants often overlook subtractive changes in favour of additive ones. Their findings indicate, in particular, that explicitly prompting people to consider subtraction makes these solutions more likely to be discovered. For time management, the contribution is methodological: looking for ways to improve a process does not necessarily mean looking for what could be removed from it.
Why existing arrangements retain an advantage
William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser (1988, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty) demonstrate status quo bias: presenting an option as the existing state of affairs can favour its retention. This mechanism is distinct from the tendency to search for additive solutions, but provides another reason to examine inherited routines. An approval step may therefore seem self-evident simply because it already exists; this application to administrative work remains a hypothesis to test, not a finding directly established by the study.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that a well-run organisation is one that removes the most steps. These studies do not support that rule: an apparently redundant operation may prevent an error, preserve a record or enable independent scrutiny. The point is not to do less useful work, but to compare explicitly different ways of achieving the same outcome, including one involving fewer operations. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
These articles do not evaluate a simplification intervention in Fribourg businesses and cannot substantiate a claim of local time savings. The subtraction experiments shed light on how solutions are sought, without establishing that removing a step produces lasting improvements in a work process. In practice, an apparent gain may also shift work to the next department: measuring only the time spent by the team making the change would be insufficient.
A practical check in Fribourg
Within SHR’s “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, one possible exercise in Fribourg is to compare the current procedure with a streamlined version of a recurring administrative workflow, such as an internal request in the agri-food sector, French–German documentation in bilingual industry or a project formality within the university hub. The team identifies a duplicate entry or an approval step as a candidate, checks with the relevant managers that it does not fulfil a regulatory, safety or quality requirement, and then tests its removal reversibly on comparable cases. The proposed measure is total processing minutes per case across all departments involved, with elapsed time, returns for correction and missing information recorded separately. The simplified procedure is retained only if processing time falls without an observed deterioration in these criteria; a limited trial does not, however, prove the absence of rare risks. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Fribourg in the canton of Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Fribourg
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