Cycle time vs touch time. Do you understand the difference?
Are you working or just waiting?
Why Does Your Team Feel Busy But Get Nothing Done?
The work isn’t the problem. The waiting is.
Think about it. How much time do you actually spend waiting? I’ll bet its a ton.
Most teams instinctually assume they’re falling behind because there’s too much on their plate. So they push harder, work longer, and stress more. But the pile doesn’t shrink. That’s because effort isn’t the bottleneck.
Time spent not working on things is what’s really holding you back from progress.
Two numbers tell the whole story.
Cycle Time vs. Touch Time
Cycle time is how long a task takes from start to finish. Assigned Monday, done Friday. That’s five days.
Touch time is how long someone actually spent doing the work. Maybe that same task only needed one hour of real effort.
So where did the other 39 hours go?
The task was sitting. Waiting to be picked up. Waiting on someone’s decision. Waiting for a gap in someone’s packed schedule. Sound familiar?
That’s your problem right there.
What a Big Gap Actually Means
A huge difference between cycle time and touch time isn’t a people problem. It’s a flow problem. Work is stacking up between steps, and nobody has a clear view of where things are getting stuck.
And the frustrating part: the tasks are usually small. It’s not that the work is hard. It’s that there’s a constant low-grade pressure of unfinished things sitting everywhere. Like a mild headache that lingers all day (or all week).
When you dig into why, it almost always comes down to one of three things:
Too many priorities. Everything is urgent, so nothing actually gets treated that way.
Not enough hands. Work arrives faster than people can pick it up.
Fuzzy ownership. Nobody’s quite sure whose job it is to move something forward.
How to Close the Gap
Don’t ask people to work faster. That’s not it. Even though this is where most managers start.
The real goal is to cut down on waiting.
Start by actually tracking both numbers on a few current projects. You don’t need special tools. A basic spreadsheet is fine. Log when something was assigned, when it got done, and take a rough guess at the real work time. Do this for a few weeks and the bottlenecks will become obvious fast.
Then work on three things:
Cap how much is in progress at once. When there’s a limit, people finish things before grabbing something new.
Automate the small stuff. Task reminders, auto-assignments, status updates. Little automations add up and keep things from stalling between steps.
Put one name on every task. Not a team. One person. Someone who owns moving it forward.
When cycle time starts creeping closer to touch time, the whole feel of the team changes. Work actually moves. The backlog gets shorter. People stop feeling like they’re spinning their wheels.
Not because they’re doing more. Because less time is being wasted waiting.
If you want to work remote…
👋 If you do want to work remote (or simply work better in the office), these are my best resources to help you do exactly that. Each one is made specifically for project management professions and leaders.
How to Optimise Your LinkedIn Profile For Success - So you can land that dream role.
ChatGPT Prompts for Resume Creation - To help customise your resume for each application
Project Management Task Tracker (Google Sheets / Excel) - Super useful for working remote
3 Big Goals Daily Template (Printable) - My daily way to make sure I get my goals done
Project Folder Structure for Project Managers - A messy folder structure is a disaster
Ultimate Project Management Hub - The best Notion template for project management
The Amazon 6-Pager Memo - The method Amazon uses to get decisions made, without wasting your time on Powerpoint presentations