Found Time!

There's a malady experienced by some folk, known as 'lost time'.

The condition arises when a chap looks around, stunned, suddenly finding themselves far from home, dressed in someone else's clothes, driving someone else's car, with no memory of how they got there, or what happened in the last 3 months. Time was lost.

Through the law of equilibrium I deduce there must be an equally common condition whereby time is found. Some harried, stressed-out individual is bemoaning the fact that they've got so many tasks and so little time, when suddenly they realise oops! today isn't Thursday -- it's only Monday -- and there's an extra 72 hours of bonus time, delivered from nowhere!

Project managers, of course, live in the optimistic belief that this syndrome will suddenly attack their whole team in spadefulls.

I've even known project manager's to try and slip a whole extra month into their nasty tricksy Gantt charts. ("Umtember" falls between November and December.)

If you happen to be infected with a wicked dose of Found Time, please take careful notes regarding cause and contagion, so your time-poor brethren can benefit.

Thank you.

No, the extra month that project managers are crying out for is "Augcember", as pitched by Harry and Paul to the Dragons in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tc6-vSYIMk

Of course, if you get neither Harry and Paul nor Dragons' Den in 'straya, then this video will not be funny in the slightest...

Perhaps the project manager views his GANTT chart like Menedeleev viewed his Periodic Table?

"It doesn't quite fit. There's something missing. Some kind of ... eka-September."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekasilicon

A project manager doesn't have to make up months to fall into this trap. The whole idea of adding up a bunch of estimates to get a schedule is based on the concept of found time.

Suppose you estimate a task to take 1 day and it actually takes you 3 (it happens). You just underestimated by 2 days. You will need to have overestimated another task by 2 days to balance this out. When's the last time that a 1 day task actually took you -1 days?

Errors don't add. See Joel Spolsky's Evidenced Based Scheduling [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html]

@dysfunctor
wow. lots of wow.
I'm just glad that someone is pointing out that Charlemagne is a figment of the imagination.

@Michael Perry
I think that Gantt charts out to have a built in fuzziness where anything scheduled more than three weeks into the future appears increasingly blurry and feint until, about six weeks out it just disappears altogether.

I feel my IP address is now on some "crackpot" list having read the Phantom Time Hypothesis on the wikipedia page....

So is a corollary of 'finding time' that you all of a sudden remember doing things that you didn't do (instead of not remembering things that you did do)?

We've run across the concept of found and lost time here at work when people try to justify a request for an IT project. They say it's going to save (find) them like 40 hours a week!

So finance comes back and says ok who are you going to let go now that you have that much extra time?

Miraculously the found time is instantly lost and somehow it didn't save them any time. Even worse, they managed to lose all the time in IT spent on the project!

Found Time!

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