Find the hours your lab loses to admin, in one week.
A one-week audit, taking 20 seconds three times a day. A tracking sheet, a short guide and automated reminders, showing how much of your team's week actually goes on science, which admin tasks cost the most, and what to fix first.
You hired your scientists to push the technology forward or to deliver client projects. Yet in most labs I walk into, a large part of the week is lost to manual data entry, calibrating and maintaining equipment, writing SOPs and COSHH assessments, reviewing batches and chasing orders.
These tasks accumulate one at a time, so they never appear as a line in the budget and nobody owns them. The teams I work with typically start with only around half the week on science.
- The tracker, with the reminders built in. A Google Sheet or Excel file that sends three check-ins a day by email, and to Slack or Teams if you like, each with a twenty-second form that writes straight into a log. Friday afternoon it sends you the summary. It takes two minutes to configure and nothing to install.
- The log. Ten categories in three groups: science, admin and operations, and lost time. Dropdowns for logging, and a Summary tab that calculates the split, flags the categories over their threshold, and turns the hours into a yearly cost. You log the entries yourself and set the reminders with Slack's
/remindor a Teams flow; the guide shows how. - The guide. Nine pages: how to run the week, the categories, how to switch on the reminders, what each flag category means, and the quick wins.
- Monday. Add your team's names, brief them in five minutes.
- Every day. An automated check-in arrives before lunch, mid-afternoon and before leaving. Tap the link, pick a category, enter the hours, add a note if something went wrong.
- Friday. Open the Summary. Read the split, the flags and the notes together, and agree the one thing to change next week.
Typical productivity gains after working with me reported by the teams I have worked with.
Take a team of eight scientists. If the audit shows the typical split, around 140 hours a week are going on admin, operations and waiting. Over a 46-week year that is roughly 6,500 hours, or close to four full-time scientists, worth about £260,000 at a loaded cost of £40 an hour.
Not all of it can be removed, but most of it can be systemised. The first fixes are usually the cheapest: labelled storage, reorder points, a shared booking calendar. The larger categories, data entry and documentation, are where a LIMS, templates, automations and a data pipeline pay for themselves within months.
The audit costs five minutes a day for one week. The sheet does the arithmetic with your numbers and your assumptions, so the case you take to your board is based on your data.
Want the proper version?
A free audit and up to half a day on site. I walk the lab with your team and follow a sample from arrival to result. If you have run the self-audit, bring the Summary tab; it gives us a head start. Within a week you get a short report ranking the two or three problems costing you the most.
