Where preparation time actually goes

Part of a single argument: the engagement gap is a workload problem.

Before you try to reduce preparation cost, find out what it is made of. Most teams have never looked, and the assumption almost everyone holds, that preparation is mostly content creation, is usually wrong.

This is a small piece of work. Two weeks, no tooling, and it changes what you spend the following quarter on.

The audit

For two weeks, ask anyone preparing a session to note their time in four buckets at the end of each day:

Finding. Locating source material, previous versions, that thing someone made last year.

Deciding. Working out what to cover and what to leave out.

Building. Actually making the thing.

Logistics. Access, invitations, testing, setup, sorting out problems.

Rough numbers are fine. Precision is not the point and chasing it will make people stop doing the audit. You are looking for the shape, and the shape is usually obvious within a week.

What people expect to find

Almost everyone predicts that building dominates. It is the part that feels like the work, the part they remember afterwards, and the part they would describe if asked what they did on Tuesday.

What they usually find

Finding and logistics together are typically half or more of the total. This is the result that surprises people, and it survives across very different kinds of team.

Deciding is small in absolute terms but concentrated: one hard scoping call that blocks everything else, often taken late, and often the reason the rest of the work happened in a rush.

Building, the part everyone was trying to optimise, is frequently the smallest of the four.

Reading your own result

The value of the audit is that these four need completely different fixes, and without measuring you will pick the wrong one.

If finding dominates, you have a library problem. Nothing about authoring tools will help. What helps is making it faster to locate and trust existing material than to rebuild it.

If logistics dominates, you have an administration problem, and it is likely to be the cheapest thing on this list to fix, because most of it is rules rather than judgement.

If deciding dominates, your sessions are trying to cover too much, and the fix is editorial rather than operational. Usually it means someone needs the authority to cut scope, and does not currently have it.

If building genuinely dominates, you are in the minority, and better authoring tools will actually help you. It is worth knowing that rather than assuming it.

Why two weeks and not one

One week is too vulnerable to whatever happened that week. Two weeks smooths out the single unusual session, and it is short enough that people will actually complete it.

Four weeks would be more accurate and will not get finished. The audit that gets done beats the audit that is better designed, and this is a case where a rough answer changes the decision anyway.