Which few tasks are eating the whole calendar?
Thirty-two tasks and how many days each took from start to done. The average is 6.94 days and the middle task is 4.5, so a two-week promise quoted off the average describes almost none of your work.
Work Starter Statistics free
After you install, this is the model to open.
How Long Do Our Tasks Really Take?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
The answer
Where the tasks land, and where the calendar goes:
- Done inside four days
- 50% of tasks
- Done inside twelve
- 84.4% of tasks
- Over twelve days
- 5 tasks
- Those five tasks
- 44.6% of all elapsed days
Chasing the median down does very little and finding out what the five slow ones had in common does almost everything, which is a different quarter of work from the one a mean would send you on. Change the bins to five-day steps to see the tail split up rather than collapsed, which is the view to use when you are setting a service level. What a histogram cannot tell you is why the slow ones were slow: a duration alone will never say whether the time went into work or into waiting.
The model
One row per finished task with its duration in calendar days, plus a column giving each task its share of all the elapsed days in the quarter.
| Tasks | 32, one quarter |
| Measure | calendar days from start to done |
| Bins | 2, 4, 6, 8, 12 days |
| Mean / median | 6.94 / 4.5 days |
| Counts, cumulative and share | calculated |
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- How much should you pad the next estimate?How Wrong Are Our Estimates, Usually?
- What three-point estimate does your history give?What Shape Are Our Task Durations?
- How many people does the rota actually need?Cover Every Hour With the Fewest People
- What is a point of utilization actually worth?Will the Team Bill Enough Hours?
- Twelve recurring tasks timed before and after an automation rollout. The paired test makes the 23-minute average saving certain, the sheet turns it into a 13-week payback, and the two tasks that got worse are the real finding.Did the Automation Deliver?
- Which big clients are quietly the expensive ones?Which Kinds of Client Do We Actually Have?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Statistics in Google Sheets.