Time management: simplify before adding another procedure?
A slow procedure often prompts a new procedure intended to speed it up. The managerial question is more precise: before adding a coordination step, should we explicitly look for steps that are no longer needed?
What the literature establishes
Gabrielle Adams, Benjamin Converse, Andrew Hales and Leidy Klotz (2021, Nature) show across a series of experiments that participants often overlook subtractive changes in favour of additive ones. Explicit prompts to consider subtraction make such solutions more likely to be chosen. For time management, this suggests a question often missing from improvement initiatives: which operation could disappear without compromising the outcome?
Why existing arrangements remain the reference point
William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser (1988, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty) document status quo bias: presenting an option as the existing situation can favour its retention. This mechanism is distinct from overlooking subtraction, but it helps explain why an established step may escape scrutiny. A longstanding approval requirement may thus be treated as a starting constraint rather than an option to reassess.
The premature conclusion
It would be too quick to conclude that a shorter procedure is necessarily better. A step may protect food safety, support mutual understanding between French- and German-speaking teams, or preserve the traceability of a university record. The aim is therefore not to remove more, but to compare explicitly the purpose a step serves with the time it requires. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these findings cannot promise
These studies do not directly measure the time savings from simplification in organisations in Fribourg. They establish neither an optimal number of approvals nor a universal rule for removing steps. In practice, a genuine time saving must also be distinguished from a transfer of checking work to another department.
A practical check in Fribourg
Within SHR — Swiss Human Resources’ “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, an exercise applicable in Fribourg would involve selecting a recurring administrative workflow in a food-processing company, a bilingual industrial business or a university service. The team would compare the current workflow with a version removing a single step considered redundant, after checking legal, safety and traceability requirements. For each comparable case, it would record active processing time across departments, elapsed time to closure, and whether rework was needed because of an error or missing information. The change would be retained only if the time saved came without a deterioration in quality or a shift of workload elsewhere. 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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