The stopwatch that found two thirds of my day

I was responsible for an important project with milestones and I was delivering them without any trouble. At some point I was asked to become head of the department I worked in, and suddenly, two months later, it turned out I was falling behind.

At a managers' meeting they asked me what had happened. I wasn't really aware of it, but I suspected the extra duties. None of them seemed to take much time on its own, but added up they might matter. I said I'd look into it.

I found an online stopwatch where you could define several tasks and switch between them, and started measuring how much time I spent programming and how much went on management meetings, answering people, helping them with everyday things and then finding my way back to where I'd stopped in the code. When someone came over and started talking, I'd stop them and say I had to switch the stopwatch.

It turned out that only a third of my programming time was left. At the next managers' meeting I said my delays came from the fact that I only program a third of the time and waste the rest. Not very diplomatic, but it was taken with amusement.

When I left the company some time later, they even gave me a T-shirt with a design about my wasting time :-)