Doing More With Less at Work: Where Your Hours Really Go (And How to Get Them Back)
Doing more with less at work comes down to this: most leaders don't have a time problem. They have hours leaking out through bloated meetings, endless "final passes" and work they should have handed off. Plug those leaks and you find capacity you didn't know you had, no extra headcount required.
Bottom line upfront: nobody is coming to give you more hours.
Every leader I talk to is hearing some version of the same message right now. Fewer people. Tighter budgets. Faster timelines. The pace keeps accelerating, and the expectation is that you'll keep up.
So high performers do what they've always done. They work harder. Earlier mornings, later nights, a "quick" Sunday catch-up that eats the whole afternoon.
That strategy has a ceiling. Most leaders hit it long before they notice.
Doing More With Less at Work Starts With Your Calendar
Here's the case, stated plainly: before you take on more, figure out why the work you already have takes as long as it does. Not a new app. Not a new planner. An honest look at where your hours actually go.
For most leaders I coach, the answer surprises them. And it usually traces back to one old idea.
Why Work Expands to Fill the Time You Give It
In 1955, a British naval historian named Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay for The Economist. Its opening line became one of the most quoted observations about work ever made:
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
That's Parkinson's Law. Give yourself two hours for a task and it takes two hours. Give yourself a day and — somehow — it takes the whole day.
It's not science. It's behavior. And once you see it, you see it everywhere. Here are the three places I see it steal the most time.
Time Trap #1: The Meeting That Should Have Been a Phone Call
Nowhere does Parkinson's Law show up faster than on your calendar.
Your calendar defaults to 30 or 60 minutes, so that's how long meetings last. Not because the topic needs it. Because the slot is there. Ten minutes of real decisions stretch to fill the hour: a slow start waiting for stragglers, a recap of last week, a tangent or two, then a scramble in the final five minutes to figure out next steps.
When I ran a manufacturing plant in Winnipeg, we had a standing meeting after every month-end close. On paper, it was a review of the numbers. In practice, it could swallow most of the day.
We cut it to two hours. Same people. Same numbers. The difference was a tighter agenda and questions submitted in advance, so the time went to discussion instead of discovery.
Multiply the hours we got back by everyone in that room, every month, and the math gets real fast.
The research tells the same story. When Future Forum surveyed 10,000 workers, executives estimated that close to half (46%) of their weekly meetings weren't worth their time — while sitting in roughly 25 hours of meetings a week. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that 71% of senior managers see meetings as unproductive.
Your most expensive people are spending a huge chunk of their week in meetings they themselves think are a waste. Here's how to take that time back:
No agenda, no meeting. And an agenda isn't a list of topics. It's the decision or outcome you need by the end. If you can't write that in one sentence, you're not ready to meet.
Send the questions first. Like we did in Winnipeg: collect questions in advance so people show up with answers, not surprises.
Change your defaults. Set your calendar to 15 and 25 minutes instead of 30 and 60. The work will shrink to fit, just like it expanded to fit.
Pick up the phone. If it's two people and one question, call. You'll have the answer before the meeting invite would have been accepted.
Cut the guest list. Everyone in the room should have a decision to make or information to give. Everyone else gets the notes.
End early, on purpose. When the outcome is reached, you're done. Handing people back 20 minutes is one of the most underrated leadership moves there is.
Not every meeting deserves to die, though. Here's the case for the one that doesn't.
Time Trap #2: The "Final Pass" That Never Ends
For years I ran investor relations for a publicly traded company. That meant investor decks — lots of them. And I worked those decks to death. Late nights. Weekends. Moving a chart two pixels. Rewording a headline for the fifth time. Rechecking numbers I'd already checked three times.
Was the deck better at 1 a.m. than at 8 p.m.? Almost never.
Some of that was my perfectionism. If I'm honest, some of it was my fear — of the question I couldn't answer, of the flaw someone would spot. Extra hours felt like insurance. They weren't. They just cost me sleep and weekends with my family.
I see this constantly in high performers. The work is done. Then the checking, rechecking and "one more pass" begins, and the task expands to fill every hour left before the deadline.
Here's how to stop the endless final pass:
Define "good enough" before you start. Who is this for, and what do they actually need from it? Write it down. When that bar is met, you're done.
Put a finish time on the calendar. Not a deadline — a stop time. When it hits, the work ships.
Cap your review rounds. One self-review, one outside set of eyes. A fourth pass rarely catches anything the third one missed.
Show it early. Get a rough draft in front of your audience at 60%. Ten minutes of early feedback beats five hours of polishing the wrong thing.
Time Trap #3: Doing It Yourself Because It's Faster
"It's faster if I just do it myself." Every leader has said it. Sometimes it's even true — once.
Do it yourself every time, though, and you've quietly made yourself the bottleneck for your whole team. Your hours go to work someone else could do, and theirs go to waiting on you.
Good delegation isn't dumping work. It's structure. My CAP™ framework (Clarify, Assign, Progress) is built for exactly this:
Clarify what done looks like. The outcome, the deadline and what they can decide without checking with you.
Assign one owner, by name. "The team will handle it" means nobody will.
Agree on progress checkpoints upfront. Set them when you hand off the work, so you're not hovering and they're not guessing.
Start with the recurring stuff. The weekly report, the status update, the standing prep. Repeatable work is the easiest to hand off and wins back the most time.
The work comes off your plate without losing control of the outcome.
What Working Longer Hours Actually Costs You
When those leaks go unplugged, most leaders cover the gap the only way they know how: more hours. The data says that's a losing trade.
Output flattens. Stanford economist John Pencavel found that once the workweek topped roughly 50 hours, each additional hour produced noticeably less. Push all the way to 70 hours and total output barely budged compared with 56. His data came from British munitions factories during World War I, so don't read the numbers literally for office work. The lesson still holds: there's a point where more hours stop buying more results.
Your team pays too. Your late nights become your team's late nights. Handoffs come late, deadlines compress and your people burn out right alongside you.
You win the wrong battles. You polish the deck and sit through the all-day review while the strategic call that actually mattered waits.
Why These Fixes Don't Stick (And How to Make Them)
Everything above works. Shorter meetings, a clear bar for "good enough," structured delegation. None of it is complicated.
So why do many leaders slide back within a month?
Because the old habits were rewarded for years. The packed calendar looked important. The flawless deliverable got noticed. Doing it yourself got it done. Under pressure, you fall back on what used to work, and nobody around you is going to stop you. Your boss is usually happy when you over-deliver.
That's where an outside voice earns its keep. Someone outside your chain of command who notices when the old habits creep back, asks why that meeting is back to an hour and holds you to the changes you said you'd make. That's what good coaching does. The tactics are the easy part. Making them stick is the work.
What to Do Starting This Week
Two moves. Run them in order.
First, audit last month's calendar. Not your intentions for next month — what actually happened. Which meetings could have been 15 minutes? Which could have been a phone call? Which didn't need you at all? Cancel, shorten or delegate three of them this week.
Second, before your next major deliverable, ask yourself three questions:
Who is this actually for, and what do they need from it?
What does "good enough" look like here?
What would really happen if I stopped now?
If that third question makes you uncomfortable, pay attention. That's where your hours are going.
Win back just one hour a week and that's roughly 50 hours a year — more than a full work week — without hiring anyone or giving up another weekend.
The Bottom Line
The pressure to do more with less isn't going away. The pace is only accelerating. The leaders who thrive won't be the ones who find more hours — there aren't any. They'll be the ones who stop leaking the hours they already have.
Start with your calendar. It's the most honest document you own.
Wondering where your hours are really going? That's exactly the conversation I have with leaders every week.
Comments