Hours at the desk have become a poor measure of how thorough an adviser is

In November 1955 The Economist published a short, dry essay by a naval historian named C. Northcote Parkinson. Its opening observation became a law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Parkinson was writing about the civil service, and his target was the way administrative headcount grew whatever the workload did. But the idea travels further than he intended, and I think it travels straight into the evening routine of a great many advisers.

For most of my career, a late evening with funds and information spread across the desk was simply what preparing properly looked like. Nobody questioned it, and there was good reason not to. Gathering performance figures, sector comparisons, charges and risk measures from several sources was slow, and it was most of the work. The hours an adviser put in were a fair proxy for the care they took.

That proxy was formed in a particular set of conditions. Data was scarce, scattered and awkward to assemble, and the adviser who assembled more of it usually knew more. Those conditions have gone. The information that once took an evening to pull together can now be gathered in minutes, and what remains scarce is the judgement applied to it: what this client needs, what the evidence says about the solution in front of them and whether it still fits.

Yet the proxy has outlived its conditions. Firms still read hours as diligence, and advisers still feel faintly guilty leaving at six with a review the next morning. This is where Parkinson stops being merely quotable. If the evening is treated as the proper home of preparation, the assembly expands to fill it, and the judgement gets whatever is left at the end.

That has consequences for the firm as well as for the adviser. A business that measures effort can't easily see where its capacity is going. When an adviser says they're full, the natural responses are another hire or fewer clients. Both are expensive. Neither asks what the full week actually contains.

So the question I'd put to any firm is a narrow one. Of the hours an adviser spends preparing for a client, how many go on putting information together, and how many on deciding what it means for that person? The first is assembly. The second is advice, and it is the part the client is paying for, the part the regulator expects to see reasoned in the file and the part nobody else in the firm can do on the adviser's behalf.

How many firms have ever measured the split. It needs nothing more elaborate than a week in which each adviser marks their preparation time under one of the two headings, honestly and without anyone treating the result as a verdict. My expectation is that assembly would take the larger share, and that the proportion would surprise the people doing it. Surprise is useful here. It shows where the old proxy is still running the week.

None of this argues for advisers doing less thinking. The opposite, if anything. Moving the assembly out of the evening only helps if the time it frees goes back into judgement, into client conversations and into the parts of running a firm that never fit into a full diary. A firm that simply fills the space with more assembly has rediscovered Parkinson rather than escaped him.

There is a cultural point underneath the operational one. Long hours carry status in professional firms, and advice is no exception. Changing how preparation is measured means accepting that an adviser who leaves on time with a well-reasoned file has done the job at least as well as one who stayed late assembling it. That is a harder shift than any change of software, because it asks a firm to stop admiring something it has admired for a long time.

The hours were only ever how diligence looked when information was hard to come by. The diligence itself was always in the judgement.