Worked scenario
The same fortnight of pressure, twelve times a year
A practice with uniform monthly cycles has half a month of overload and half a month of spare capacity, and treats both as unavoidable.
3 min read
Compliance deadlines are fixed and identical across clients, so practices concentrate their work into the days before them. The rest of the month runs at a fraction of capacity.
Not every task has to wait
A large share of monthly work — recording purchases, reconciling banks, chasing documents — does not depend on the month having ended. It waits because that is the habit, not because it must.
Cut-offs are negotiable more often than assumed
Clients who supply documents in the first week can be worked on in the first week. Some will not, but the practice rarely asks, so the whole book is scheduled to the least cooperative client's habits.
Measuring the imbalance
Hours by day of month, over a quarter. The shape is usually more extreme than anyone expects, and it makes the case for staggering better than any argument about workload.
What changes
- Client work scheduled across the month rather than into the peak
- Cut-off dates agreed per client, not assumed to be uniform
- Capacity in the quiet fortnight used deliberately
- Peak load measured so the imbalance is visible
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