The phrase conjures a specific image: someone with a clipboard and a stopwatch standing behind a worker, logging every movement. That image is part of the reason many business owners dismiss the concept as either outdated or intrusive. Neither characterisation is accurate for how a time in motion study actually works in a modern SME context.
What a time in motion study actually does is answer a simple question: how is time in this role actually being spent, compared to how it should be spent? That's it. The tool is a systematic way of understanding the real allocation of working time — and the gap between that reality and what the business needs.
That gap is where the cost is. And in most businesses, the gap is significant.
Time Study Template
An observation sheet that works out standard time and units per shift for you, the worked example below filled in, and an activity sampling log for varied roles. Jump to the worked example ↓
The Origin — Brief, Relevant, Not Academic
Frederick Winslow Taylor developed the concept of scientific management in the late 1800s, arguing that work processes should be studied and optimised using objective observation and measurement rather than custom and intuition. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth extended this in the early 1900s — their work gave us the phrase "time and motion study" and the practice of breaking tasks into micro-steps to find inefficiencies.
The original application was manufacturing: how does a worker on a production line move, and how can that movement be made faster and less tiring? In that context, the stopwatch and clipboard were appropriate tools. You were measuring physical motions over short, repetitive cycles.
The principle transferred cleanly to knowledge work and service businesses. The specific techniques adapted. The core question — how is time actually being spent, and what should change — remained exactly the same.
What a Modern Time in Motion Study Looks Like for an SME
Nobody is standing behind your team with a stopwatch. A modern study for a service or trade business uses three primary methods:
Activity sampling. The person being studied logs their activity at set intervals — every 15 or 30 minutes throughout the working day. Over one to two weeks, a statistically robust picture emerges of how their time is actually distributed across activity categories. The categories are defined in advance: direct chargeable work, travel, admin, waiting, rework, communication, meetings, and so on.
Time diary analysis. A structured log kept by the individual for a defined period, capturing task, duration, and whether the activity was planned or reactive. More granular than activity sampling. Used when the issue is specifically about task switching, interruption patterns, or the split between planned and reactive work.
Structured observation. Where the role involves physical work or customer interaction, a brief period of direct observation by the analyst adds context that self-reporting cannot. This is used selectively — for field-based roles, customer-facing positions, or where self-reporting accuracy is in doubt. It is conducted openly, with the individual's knowledge.
For most office, service and trade roles, activity sampling combined with a short structured interview gives a clear and actionable picture. Direct observation is worth adding where the physical or customer-facing part of the job is the likely source of lost time.
Time Study vs Motion Study: What's the Difference?
The two names are usually said together, but they answer different questions.
| Time study | Motion study | |
|---|---|---|
| The question | How long should this task take? | Is this the best way to do the task? |
| Where it came from | Frederick Taylor, late 1800s | Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, early 1900s |
| What you record | Timed readings for each step of the task | The movements in each step: reaching, walking, searching, handling |
| What you get | A standard time for the task | A simpler method with wasted movement taken out |
In practice you use them together, and in that order. Motion study fixes the method first; time study then measures the improved method. Timing a badly laid-out task only tells you, very precisely, how long the waste takes. "Time in motion study" is a common variation of the name and means the same thing.
How to Do a Time Study: A Worked Example
The example below times a task found in many small online retail and print businesses: picking and packing one order. The same five steps work for any repeated task with a clear start and finish, such as a standard boiler service, an MOT, assembling a product or plating a set-menu dish.
Step 1: Break the task into elements
Split the task into steps, called elements, each with an obvious start and end point you can time. Here there are three: pick the items from the shelves, pack and seal the box, then print and stick on the label. Keep elements short enough to time accurately but long enough to see clearly, usually somewhere between a few seconds and a couple of minutes.
Step 2: Time each element over several cycles
Time the same person doing the task several times. Five to ten cycles is usually enough to see a reliable average. Tell them what you are doing and why: the aim is to find slow steps in the process, not to judge the person, and a study done in secret gives worse data and damages trust.
| Element | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Average (secs) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pick the items | 62 | 58 | 65 | 60 | 55 | 60.0 |
| Pack and seal | 48 | 52 | 50 | 47 | 53 | 50.0 |
| Print and label | 21 | 19 | 24 | 18 | 18 | 20.0 |
If one reading is far out of line, say double the others, find out why before you include it. It is usually an interruption or a missing item. Leave it out of the average, but write it down: interruptions and missing stock are findings in their own right.
Step 3: Rate the pace
People speed up or slow down when they are being watched, and some simply work faster than others. A pace rating adjusts for this. 100 means a normal, steady pace that could be kept up all day. 110 means 10% quicker than normal; 90 means 10% slower. In this example the packer picked a little slowly (95) and packed quicker than normal (110).
The basic time is the time the element would take at a normal pace: average × pace rating ÷ 100.
| Element | Average (secs) | Pace rating | Basic time (secs) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pick the items | 60.0 | 95 | 57.0 |
| Pack and seal | 50.0 | 110 | 55.0 |
| Print and label | 20.0 | 100 | 20.0 |
| Total basic time | 132.0 |
Step 4: Add allowances
Nobody works a full shift without pauses. Allowances add time for rest, personal needs and small unavoidable delays. Figures of 10–20% are common; physically demanding or hot work justifies more. Using 15%: 132.0 × 0.15 = 19.8 seconds.
Step 5: Work out the standard time
Standard time = basic time + allowances = 132.0 + 19.8 = 151.8 seconds, or about 2.5 minutes per order. Over a 7.5-hour shift (27,000 seconds), that is 27,000 ÷ 151.8 = 177 orders per packer per shift.
What to do with the number
- Plan capacity. A day with 600 orders needs 600 ÷ 177 = 3.4 packer-shifts, so you plan for four people, not "whoever is around".
- Know your labour cost per unit. At a fully loaded cost of £15 an hour, 151.8 seconds of work costs about £0.63 per order. That is a number you can put into pricing and compare with a fulfilment company's quote.
- Find the slow step. Picking is 57 of the 132 seconds of basic time, 43% of the task. Shelf layout, pick-list order and stock location are where to look first, and that is a motion study question.
- Set fair targets. A target built on a measured standard time is easier to defend than one based on the fastest person on their best day.
Standard Time Calculator
Enter the average time and pace rating for each element. The calculator works out the standard time, output per shift and labour cost per unit, using the same method as the worked example above.
Standard Time Calculator
Free Time Study Template (Excel)
The template does all of the sums above for you. Type in your readings and pace ratings and it works out the averages, basic time, allowances, standard time, units per hour and units per shift. It includes:
- A blank time study sheet with room for 10 elements and 10 readings each
- The worked example above, filled in, so you can see how the numbers flow
- An activity sampling log for varied roles in offices, trades and field work: tick what you are doing every 15 minutes and it shows the percentage of time and hours per week spent on each activity
It works in Excel and Google Sheets.
Download the Time Study Template
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What It Reveals
The most common finding is a gap between how people think they spend their time and how they actually spend it. That gap is not dishonesty. People are simply poor at recalling how a varied working week was divided up, and they tend to remember the main task and forget the interruptions around it.
That is why a study measures rather than asks. An engineer may feel that most of the day is chargeable work; the log may show a large share going on travel, waiting for parts and paperwork. An office manager may estimate four hours of admin; the log may show six, once the informal requests and interruptions are counted. Until you measure, you are managing an estimate.
The specific patterns that emerge most often:
- Tasks that take far longer than estimated, because informal rework or correction is baked in but invisible as a separate activity
- Communication overhead — emails, messages and informal check-ins that individually seem trivial but collectively consume 2–3 hours per day in roles where that time should be spent doing something else
- Bottleneck roles where one person is a decision point for too many different processes — and spends significant time responding to queries that should be handled by a system or another team member
- Travel time that is greater than estimated, particularly for field roles where the scheduling optimisation assumptions don't match the reality of job sequencing
- Meetings that produce decisions that could have been made in an email — consuming group time for low-return outcomes
Illustration: picture an operations coordinator in a delivery business spending over two hours a day answering "where is my order?" calls, because tracking information is not updated in real time. An automation that sends each customer an update when their job is completed would remove most of those calls, and return close to a day a week of the coordinator's time.
What It Can Find: Three Illustrations
The scenarios below are illustrations, not client results. The point is the arithmetic: small daily losses that nobody tracks add up to large annual costs.
Admin tasks eating field time. Take a small roofing contractor whose two most experienced roofers each spend 45 minutes a day on paperwork: site reports, job sheets and material requests. If replacing those with short forms completed on a phone saves 30 minutes per roofer per day, that is 5 hours a week. At an illustrative charge-out rate of £50 an hour, that is £250 a week, or about £12,000 over a 48-week year, from paperwork alone.
Meetings that do not earn their time. Suppose a four-person professional services firm logs its week and finds that 22% of office hours go on internal meetings, and that participants rate less than half of that time as useful afterwards. Across four people on 37.5-hour weeks, 22% is 33 hours a week. Replacing two long weekly meetings with a short daily stand-up is one common fix; the activity log shows whether it worked.
Rework that nobody calls rework. Imagine a print firm whose production manager spends 90 minutes a day on "artwork corrections", a task never tracked separately because it feels like part of the job. Out of a 7.5-hour day, that is 20% of their time. The cause is often upstream: a vague brief taken at the quoting stage. A better brief template removes the cause instead of absorbing the symptom every day.
When to Use a Time in Motion Study
Three situations make it the right tool:
A role with high cost and unclear output. If you are paying a significant salary and cannot clearly articulate what the person produces in a typical week — or if you suspect the output doesn't justify the cost — a time study will tell you definitively. Either it confirms the role is productive and the value was just invisible to you, or it surfaces the specific activities that need to change.
A suspected efficiency gap that you can't pin down. You know the team is busy. Revenue isn't reflecting the busyness. Something is absorbing capacity that isn't being turned into output. The time study identifies what that something is, with data rather than guesswork.
You want to scale a role and need to understand what's actually required. Before hiring a second person to do the same job, it's worth understanding whether the current person's time is well-allocated. A time study on the existing role often shows activities that could be removed, automated or reassigned — meaning the role can absorb more volume without an additional hire.
What Happens Next
The output of a time study is a clear breakdown of time allocation with a specific diagnosis of where time is being lost and why. That diagnosis drives one of three outcomes:
Process redesign. If the time loss is structural — caused by a broken process, a missing system, or an unnecessary step — the fix is a redesigned process. This often connects directly to a Process Redesign or SOP Documentation engagement.
Role restructuring. If the time loss is caused by role boundaries being wrong — a person doing work that belongs to a different role, or one person carrying responsibility that should be shared — the fix is a restructure of responsibilities.
System or automation change. If the time loss is caused by manual tasks that a system could handle — data entry, chasing, reporting — the fix is tooling. Often the cheapest and fastest fix with the most durable result.