Work That Resists a Job Number
Some real work genuinely has no job to sit on. The six kinds, why forcing them onto a job is worse than leaving them off, and where they should go.
Some work genuinely has no job to sit on, and forcing it onto the nearest one is worse than recording it honestly as unattributed. Six kinds of work resist attribution, each for a different reason, and each has a proper home that is not a job number.
The commercial issue in “Work That Resists a Job Number” becomes easier to audit when estimated work, recorded hours and approved changes remain distinct. Teams considering see the available configuration options for remote desktop monitoring software can strengthen the project-time evidence without treating a software report as a substitute for the quote, contract or accepted invoice.
Knowing which is which is what stops a costing system quietly loading one customer with everybody else's overheads.
The assumptions behind “Work That Resists a Job Number” can also be checked against monday.com work-management resources. Record which guidance applies to the real workflow and which points require professional advice.
One: supervision
Spread across everything and attributable to nothing. A supervisor's hour serves four jobs and the split is arbitrary.
- Supervision — spread across everything, attributable to nothing.
- Quoting — attributable to a job that may never exist.
- Training — attributable to the person, not the job.
- Internal projects — real work with no customer.
- Interruptions — below any grain anybody will record.
- Waiting — caused by scheduling, not by any job.
Home: the pool, recovered through the rate. Attributing it to the job the supervisor happened to discuss makes that job look expensive.
Two: quoting and estimating
Attributable to a prospective job that may never exist. Charged to the job if won, carried by everything if not.
Home: the pool, with the win rate as the implicit multiplier. Covered in its own note.
Three: training
Attributable to the person, not to any job, and to future jobs rather than present ones.
Home: the rate, as a layer. Booking it to whichever job was running makes that job carry a cost that belongs to the next year.
Four: internal projects
Real work with a real purpose and no customer. A system implementation, a process change, an audit response.
Home: its own internal job, so the cost is visible, with no recovery mechanism. The visibility is the point: internal work absorbed into the pool is invisible and therefore unmanaged.
Five: interruptions
Short, frequent, unattributable at the grain anybody will record. Ten minutes helping a colleague, four times a day.
Home: the pool. Any attempt to attribute these produces rounding that exceeds the quantity being measured.
Six: waiting
Time where the person is available and there is nothing to do. Real, paid, and not caused by any job.
Home: the pool, named. Calling it idle time moves a scheduling fact onto a person, which is the subject of its own note here.
What forcing them onto a job does
Inflates whichever job is open and deflates the measured non-chargeable share. The operation then believes its chargeability is higher than it is and its rate lower than it should be.
Both errors push in the direction of under-recovery.
The honest structure
A small set of non-job codes, one per category, used deliberately. Not a single catch-all, because a single code tells you nothing about which kind of non-chargeable work is growing.
Six codes. People use them accurately because they describe real situations.
The effect on the rate
Nothing, directly: these hours were always being carried. What changes is that they become visible, which means the rate can be built on a measured chargeable figure rather than an assumed one.
It usually raises the rate, which is an unpopular finding and a correct one.
The category that grows
Watch which of the six is rising. Growth in interruptions means something structural about how work arrives. Growth in internal projects means a change programme nobody costed.
Each has an owner outside the costing function, which is why the split matters.
The six codes in practice
They have to be short, obvious and few, or people will use the first one on the list for everything. Naming them in the language of the operation rather than in accounting terms is most of the battle.
"Helping someone" works better than "indirect labour — collaborative". The second is more precise and will be used half as often.
What to do when a category grows
Take it to whoever owns the cause rather than to the people recording it. Growth in interruptions is a question for whoever designs how work arrives; growth in internal projects is a question for whoever approves them.
Taken to the team instead, the only available response is to record less of it, which removes the signal and changes nothing.
The seventh kind
Work for a job that has not been opened yet: the early conversations, the mobilisation, the preparation before a number exists.
It is chargeable work with nowhere to go, and it usually ends up in quoting or in the catch-all. Opening the job earlier, in a provisional state, is the fix and it is a process change rather than a costing one.
What not to do with the figure
Set a target on the total. The categories exist to be diagnosed, and a target on their sum makes them migrate into the nearest job, which is exactly the behaviour this note is about preventing.