On number crunching

This is in response to Jason Della Rocca's post on Acronym about crunching the numbers, where he shows how he was asked to break down his work time into cateogries, which he did by using TimePanic. I don't know that program and will check it out, but I did want to post something about this issue.

I was asked to do this a couple of years ago by my association board in relation to allocating admin time for every program we run (we have about ten programs, big to small, mostly continuing-education programs, plus a bunch of committees, plus governance work). But attempting to allocate my time was a heinous nightmare, because I continuously multitask and it was basically impossible to make anything add up to 100%. I was asked to do a spreadsheet listing all activities and tasks within programs, plus any General & Administrative activities, basically listing everything I did at the time. Each column listed the month, and each horizontal line was the activity over 12 months. So horizontally, there was a percentage of time worked which tended to peak for most activities in August/Sept (start of classes), in the Spring (printing of program brochures, promotion) and early summer (admissions). But vertically, the columns all added up to something like 367% - because I work on things at the same time, not one by one. This proved impossible to explain to anyone logically, although I suppose I should have just said that there were more than 100 individual activities so I would have had to break everything down into fractions of percents... you get my drift (or not, but that's the point!)

So now, two years later, I have just been asked to do this again, for the same reason, to allocate the administrative costs of running programs to those programs for budgeting reasons. (There's another negative issue to this, which is that if you really do this, you put a bunch of programs "in the red" which are otherwise breaking even with their tuition income, so there has historically been reluctance to do it, even though we know we're supposed to for audits etc.). So anyway I said, I did this already and am not touching that original spreadsheet with a ten foot pole, because I can still find grey hairs that sprouted on my head as a direct result of having to do it the first time! We then decided that since this is just for budgeting purposes, then we may just need to basically make it up in terms of allocating a percentage of time for each program.

So my semi-rhetorical question is, if stating time allocation for real does not create the result you need, and making it up does, but is making it up, then what's the point?