Prioritisation: should successful priorities automatically be renewed?
Time allocation often draws on the results of previous periods. The management question is specific: how can we prevent activities already receiving preferential treatment from becoming the only ones whose value we can demonstrate?
What the literature establishes
James March (1991, Organization Science) formalises a tension between exploiting known possibilities and exploring new ones. His model shows how the more immediate and predictable returns from exploitation can attract an increasing share of resources. Applied to scheduling, this mechanism suggests that an activity may retain priority because it already benefits from accumulated experience, rather than because its future superiority has been established.
When experience narrows the comparison
Daniel Levinthal and James March (1993, Strategic Management Journal) analyse forms of myopia that organisational learning can produce. Experience can improve established practices while leaving possibilities distant from current activities, or slower to yield results, out of view. Available results then become a selective basis for comparison: the organisation knows more about what it already spends time on.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that time should be taken away from proven activities and systematically reserved for something new. These papers justify neither that rule nor a universal proportion of time to reallocate. In precision work, retaining a reliable practice can be entirely rational; the distinction is between lacking experience with an alternative and having evidence that it serves no purpose. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
These two papers primarily offer modelling and theoretical analysis, not an experiment on industrial teams’ schedules in Neuchâtel. They therefore do not quantify the expected benefit of redistributing working hours in this setting. Conversely, comparing only the raw results of established activities and alternatives is rarely enough: allocated time, maturity and qualification requirements may differ.
A practical check in Neuchâtel
For a microtechnology, watchmaking or precision microelectronics team in Neuchâtel, SHR’s “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme can propose an audit of renewed priorities without changing qualified production processes. Over a period defined in advance, record each renewal justified by positive past results, the planned and actual hours, and whether an alternative was examined against an explicit criterion. The measure is the proportion of these renewals accompanied by such a comparison, verifiable in the decision log. This ratio does not measure the ultimate quality of decisions; it checks whether continuity is being examined or simply reproduced. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Neuchâtel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Neuchâtel
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