Shapes

What Choosing A Shape Can And Cannot Fix

Rearranging your own working day is the only lever either end controls without moving. Here is the exact size of it.

There are two quantities in this record. One of them is the gap between two clocks, which nobody can change. The other is the shape of each end's working day, which either end can change by deciding to.

That second quantity is the whole of the available action, and it is worth being precise about how much it is worth before reaching for it.

For workflows that pass through several time zones, employee attendance tracking software can connect recorded effort with project stages without turning activity into a verdict on performance. A useful external reference for the surrounding topic is Trello.

What it can fix

A difference of habit. If one end keeps early hours and the other keeps late ones, they have added up to two hours to whatever gap exists. Both moving to the same shape recovers those two hours completely, costs one hour's adjustment each, and is the best-value change anywhere in the record.

One hour of gap in one direction. Lengthening a day from eight hours to nine absorbs the first hour of gap entirely, provided the extra hour is at the end the gap pushes towards. It buys one hour and no more.

The far edge. Breaking a day into two blocks keeps something alive at gaps of eight and nine, where every unbroken arrangement has already failed.

What it cannot fix

The middle of the range. At a gap of three, four or five hours, no rearrangement in this record does better than two ordinary days already do. The long shape matches them in one direction, the split shape does considerably worse, and the three positions of the eight-hour block are equivalent once aligned.

This is the most useful negative result here. The gaps where people most want a clever answer are precisely the gaps where there is not one.

Anything past nine hours. Every arrangement in this record leaves nothing at a gap of ten or more. There is no shape, no stretch and no combination that reaches that far, and the next section explains why that is a property of the problem rather than a gap in the record.

The lever is real and it is short. It works on habits, on one hour of gap, and at the extreme edge. In the middle it does nothing, and the middle is where most people are standing.

The order to try things in

Align the shapes. Free, up to two hours, and almost always overlooked.
Check the direction. If one end can lengthen its day towards the other, that is one more hour. If the lengthening is on the wrong side it is worth nothing.
Only then consider breaking a day, and only if the gap is eight hours or more. Below that it costs more than it returns.

Anything beyond that is not a change of shape. It is a change of gap, and the next section measures what those are worth.

A worked case

Two ends, five hours apart on the clock. One keeps early hours, eight to four; the other keeps late ones, ten to six. The early end is the one that is behind.

As it stands, the habit difference adds to the clock gap, because the end that is already ahead is also the end starting later. Effectively seven hours apart. One shared hour a day.

Both move to standard hours. The habit difference disappears. Five hours apart, three shared hours — a gain of two, bought with one hour of adjustment at each end.

Or they swap habits, the behind end taking the late shape and the ahead end the early one. The habit difference now works against the clock gap instead of with it. Effectively three hours apart, five shared hours — a gain of four, bought with the same one hour of adjustment at each end, applied in the opposite direction.

The third option is twice as good as the second and costs exactly the same. Nobody considers it, because swapping habits feels like a strange thing to propose and aligning them feels like the obvious fix.

What the worked case shows

Three things, and the third is the one worth keeping.

The habit difference is as large as several hours of clock difference and is the only part of the arrangement that costs nothing to change.

Its direction matters as much as its size. Two hours of habit can add to the gap or subtract from it, and the difference between those two outcomes is four hours of shared time.

The obvious fix is not the best fix. Aligning hours is better than nothing. Arranging them so that each end's habits pull towards the other is better still, and it is available for the same price.

The cheapest four hours in this record are bought by two people agreeing to keep the hours that feel slightly wrong to each of them, in the specific directions that happen to help.

The thing to keep hold of

Every figure on this page is a number of shared hours. None of them is a statement about whether the arrangement is a good idea, how tired anybody will be, or what the work actually needs.

The shapes are conventions, declared once at the start of this section and not adjusted since. What they are worth to a particular pair of people doing a particular job is not something a table can settle.