You’re Going to Waste 500+ Hours in 2026. Here’s Why and How to Change It

My singular prediction for the new year is this. 500+ hours will be wasted per safety professional in 2026.

If…

You continue down the path of paper and manual processes.

You know all that time you use to transfer information from paper or Word to Excel? And that time you use to chase people for information that they likely do not have or would take forever to provide? And of course, that time you spend trying to clean the data you have spent forever manually entering and duplicating. Yup. You get my drift.

Experience has taught me that 10+ hours is wasted every week on these very tasks. Multiply that by 52 weeks of the year and you have 520 irretrievable hours lost. Without result.

Let’s dive a little deeper into these thieves of time. For effect, let’s call them the 7 Time Thieves 😎. It is very important to know what steals all this time so you can put a stop to it.

Here is where the hours typically go.

Monday: Send reminder email about overdue corrective action

Tuesday: No response, send another reminder

Wednesday: Chase via Teams message

Thursday: Still nothing, escalate to supervisor

Friday: Follow up again

Repeat next week for the same action. Maybe eventually give up.

Chasing corrective actions and following up on overdue actions or much needed signatures are some of the worst time thieves I experienced when working as a safety professional. It’s amazing how much time is lost to follow-up and how badly it tends to end up - either you get what you need too late or it eventually gets parked. Yikes.

Why this happens is because of lack of automation and manual tracking.

Cleaning messy data monthly is one of the reasons why I am passionate about meaningful data collection. Collect the data right and cleaning will be a thing of the past or will take minimal effort. There is a big risk though when you’re cleaning data that you do not fully understand as you would be forced to decide what to keep and what not to. What if you get rid of critical stuff?

Power Query can automate cleaning. But… it only does that based on your own input/logic. Do a poor job at it and Power Query will keep up the mess. By the time you realise it, so much time has been wasted. You now have to start again. Still manually. Ouch.

The culprit here is unstructured data collection, poor data validation and of course no single source of truth.

The leadership meeting is this Thursday.

You know that report you have to prepare weekly, monthly, quarterly? That one where you have to repeat that same task and do it all manually? You pull data from multiple unrelated/unconnected sources. Create a PowerPoint presentation in the hopes of appearing “digital”. You write the narrative summaries, create charts manually, review, edit, tweak etc. Repeat for the next meeting.

You prepare the same stats and powerpoint slides. It becomes monotonous and “expected”.

Why is this happening? Errrr no real-time dashboards. No automated reporting. Probably due to lack of digital capability. Not your fault but it kinds looks like it is.

Ever had the misfortune of trying to locate a specific file and after days of searching and messaging the team, it is found in someone’s personal OneDrive.

Or finding files scattered everywhere and wondering which is the correct version? Is this still relevant? Is it still in use? Zero audit trail. And because it is H&S, we cannot just archive or delete them - you have to be certain. So you spend time sorting that out. It is important. Yet, all that time could have been saved with a proper document repository, naming convention, some good old version control and even an audit trail/log.

In this previous issue, I wrote about how you can set one up on SharePoint.

Manual tracking and certificates, recording completions and refresher dates into Excel, sending reminders manually via email, manually chasing people to complete training or to find out why they didn’t attend that mandatory session, and updating your master training matrix 😁, are some of the ways you lose time to training admin

This often happens because there is no learning management system and are still relying on paper-based training management. Whilst I love to keep some manual ways in training, a lot of time can be saved by taking aspects of it digital. There are lightweight digital tools that can help.

I believe a lot of meetings are unnecessary. Sometimes it could be set to recur and so we often feel obligated to attend. But if there is no agenda and no updates on the said topic of focus, that meetings should be cancelled. besides, dashboards can help keep everyone updated without the need for a meeting. Yes?

Does this happen to you? Where you are unable to focus or are unproductive 5-10 minutes before a meeting and possibly 15-30 minutes after a meeting? For me, I find I cannot switch back to “work” mode after a call especially if another meeting is imminent. The days I have no meetings are my most productive. Throw in an unexpected meeting and I guarantee you my focus gets a little scattered.

With someone like me on your team, and lots of meetings to get through (some of which may be unnecessary), it would be hard to get the best from me on meeting-heavy days. The pre and post-meeting fog can easily cost 2-3 hours a day. In a year, that’s well over 100 hours thanks to disruptions.

Meetings have their place for alignment, decisions, problem-solving. But for status updates? Those don’t need a room. A live dashboard showing key information keeps everyone informed without pulling them away from work. When status lives in a system instead of a slide deck, you reclaim not just the time itself, but the focus lost.

Interruptions and broken processes are big thieves of time.

For example, answering the same questions over and over or re-explaining procedures that should be documented. “Where’s the incident form?”. Or where is the Risk Assessment for xyz?” “When do we start a fire watch?”

Sometimes, even with digital, troubleshooting broken processes or technical issues is inevitable. “Why didn’t the safety manager get the notification?”. “Is the workflow broken, as the conditions set seem to have failed?”

These are just some examples but I am sure you get the gist. Clearly, these happen because processes remain undocumented, system break easily and do not have a technical owner, lack of self-service option like an intranet where people can find answers to the commonly asked questions. These seemingly small interruptions can derail focus and drain energy

In all, these time thieves seem to have similar root causes:

Absolutely.

Let me break them down into categories:

Multiple those 500 hours by the hourly rate of your safety manager. Let’s say £30 per hour. That is £15,000 a year. And if you have a team of more than one, multiply that by the number of people in your team.

Don’t know about you. But going digital did propel my career to greater heights. Aside your personal growth and using that time to develop your skills, you could also use that time to build strategic safety program that could reduce incident rates and their severity. Yes?

Burnout and reactive stressful work, late nights, feeling forced to work weekends and overtime without monetary rewards, and feelings of being left behind, does impact physical and mental health.

While you’re drowning in admin, other departments are thriving with automation, building dashboards and getting recognition - leadership is questioning the value of safety (because they only see admin work). And guess what? Because all your time is taken by admin work, incidents are increasing because you don’t have time for prevention.

The cost of doing nothing is too high.

Where is your time going to every week? Keep track of it. Identify where you are spending more time on admin. I suspect you will find you are losing a lot more than 10 hours a week.

Of the 7 time thieves listed above, which one…

Start there.

Here are some of the things I would do for some of the biggest time thieves I have experienced:

For follow-ups, I would

For data cleaning, I would

For monthly reporting, I would

The key is to start with one challenge at a time. Ask yourself if it would benefit from automation - because, truth is, you don’t need to automate everything.

Test, Refine, then move the next.

Option 1 - Stick with what you’re familiar with.

Same manual processes.

Same loss of time.

Same frustration.

Option 2 - Commit to automating your biggest time thief.

Invest 6-8 hours a month over the next 6 months.

Reclaim 300-500 hours per year.

Go from being a highly paid administrator to strategic.

Which shall it be?

My prediction?

Most will stick with option 1. 👀

Not because they want to but because they don’t know how to implement option 2. Where do I start from? I hear you ask yourself.

If option 2 sounds right but you’re unsure where to begin, that’s exactly what I built NavigatorPRO for. NavigatorPRO is built around 5 pillars:

✅ Data Collection & Quality - Get data RIGHT first (foundation) 

✅ Digital Systems & Integration - Build on solid data architecture 

✅ Cleaning, Modeling & Evidence - Automate pipelines 

✅ Analysis, Visualisation & Reporting - Executive dashboards 

✅ AI, Automation & Orchestration - Intelligent workflows

Every month, you ship a working system with my and my team’s support. More info HERE.

But, I want to be sure this is the right support for you. So I am offering free consultation to serious individuals and teams. We will explore your current state, your goals and if NavigatorPRO can help actualise those awesome dreams of yours. DM me if you would like to talk this through.

And…. if training and coaching isn’t what you’re looking for, but need help with implementing a digital system? Still DM me. I’ve got you.

We cannot close this or the year without answering this question.

How many hours did you actually waste this year?

Well, you cannot get 2025 back. So the real question is…

How many will you waste in 2026?

You can change it and write a different story in December 2026.

Are you ready? Start small. Start with one process. Come back here or to my DM to tell me how it went.

Now, let’s build! 🚀