Worksheet

Time Core

What comes first, what waits, and what breaks if we are late?

How to use it

Each area of the Time Core gets its own page. Its working parts are set out as prompts — not a form to complete, but the things worth having a view on. The last part of each page lists what the area touches in the other cores, because a position taken here usually commits something there.

Read about the Time Core

The Omnigoal · Time Core · What comes first, what waits, and what breaks if we are late?

Project management

Getting defined work done by a date: agreeing what it is, sequencing what depends on what, running it, and ending it properly.

ForDate

  1. Defining the work

    What is being done, what is not, and what would count as finished.

  2. Sequence

    What has to happen before what, what the project depends on that it does not control, and which chain actually determines the date.

  3. Running it

    How progress is established, how change is handled, and how a problem becomes visible before the deadline, not at it.

  4. Closing

    Ending the project deliberately: confirming it is done, releasing the people, and recording what actually happened so the next estimate is better.

What this touches elsewhere

  • Goal Core — A project exists to achieve a goal; where it cannot be traced to one, it is activity.

  • Business Core — Projects consume the capacity of people who also have operational work, which is where most delays originate.

  • Contingency Planning (Time Core) — What happens when a project slips is decided there, and it should be decided before it slips.

  • Data Core — Estimate accuracy is measurable and improves only when it is measured.

The Omnigoal · theomnigoal.com · CC BY 4.0 · Andreas Baggesen

The Omnigoal · Time Core · What comes first, what waits, and what breaks if we are late?

Market Timing

Whether now is the right moment: whether the market is ready, how long the opening lasts, what would tell you it is opening, and what being early or late actually costs.

ForDate

  1. Market readiness

    Whether the conditions for demand actually exist: awareness of the problem, willingness to pay, and whatever infrastructure the solution depends on.

  2. The window

    How long the opening lasts and what closes it.

  3. Signals to watch

    What would indicate the market is becoming ready, watched by someone instead of noticed in retrospect.

  4. Early and late

    What each error costs, which is asymmetric and usually assessed as though it were not.

What this touches elsewhere

  • Market Core — Whether the opportunity exists is settled there; whether now is the moment is settled here.

  • Goal Core — Timing determines when an opportunity becomes a goal rather than remaining an observation.

  • Business Core — Entering early consumes cash for longer, which is a runway question before it is a strategy one.

  • Golden Opportunities (Time Core) — A window opening is one of the ways a golden opportunity arrives.

The Omnigoal · theomnigoal.com · CC BY 4.0 · Andreas Baggesen

The Omnigoal · Time Core · What comes first, what waits, and what breaks if we are late?

Golden Opportunities

The rare openings that are worth reorganising around: how to recognise one, how to check it is real, whether the organisation can act, and what to learn from the ones it did not take.

ForDate

  1. Recognising them

    How an unusual opportunity gets noticed and raised, given that it usually arrives inconveniently and to someone without a route to escalate.

  2. Qualifying

    Establishing quickly whether it is what it appears to be, on a shorter process than the standard one, since the standard one takes longer than the opportunity lasts.

  3. Capacity to act

    Whether the organisation can actually move: people who could be released, money that is not committed, and authority that does not require a cycle.

  4. The record

    What was taken, what was declined and what happened afterwards — without which there is little way to know whether the organisation’s judgement about these is any good.

What this touches elsewhere

  • Goal Core — Taking an exceptional opportunity means displacing something, which is a goal decision, not an addition.

  • Business Core — Capacity to act is capacity that is otherwise unused, which is expensive and is what makes it available.

  • Market Core — Most golden opportunities are market events, and the ones that are not are usually capability ones.

  • Market Timing (Time Core) — Whether the moment is genuinely temporary is a timing question and it decides how fast the answer has to come.

The Omnigoal · theomnigoal.com · CC BY 4.0 · Andreas Baggesen

The Omnigoal · Time Core · What comes first, what waits, and what breaks if we are late?

Contingency Planning

What happens when the plan slips: where it slips, what absorbs it, what the fallback is, and when the decision to change course has to be taken.

ForDate

  1. Slippage

    Where plans actually slip, by how much and why — established from history, not from the assumption that this time will be different.

  2. Buffers

    Reserve held deliberately and visibly rather than hidden inside individual estimates, where it is consumed without anyone noticing.

  3. The fallback plan

    What is done instead, prepared far enough in advance that it remains available when it is needed.

  4. Decision points

    When the choice between continuing and changing course has to be taken, derived from the lead time of the alternatives rather than from the deadline.

What this touches elsewhere

  • Project management (Time Core) — Slippage is a project’s most common failure, and this object is what the project does about it.

  • Business Core — Supply resilience covers what happens when supply fails; this object covers what happens when time does.

  • Goal Core — A slipped plan raises the question of whether the goal moves, which is a decision, not a consequence.

  • Data Core — Slippage history is data the organisation already has and almost never uses.

The Omnigoal · theomnigoal.com · CC BY 4.0 · Andreas Baggesen

The Omnigoal · Time Core · What comes first, what waits, and what breaks if we are late?

Year Wheel

The organisation’s year as it actually repeats: the cycle it runs on, the dates it cannot move, how the load falls across it, and the rhythm in which it looks at itself.

ForDate

  1. The cycle

    What actually repeats annually — the demand pattern, the operating rhythm and the planning cycle — drawn, not assumed.

  2. Fixed points

    The dates that cannot move: statutory deadlines, contractual dates, industry events and periods when nothing can be changed.

  3. Load across the year

    How work distributes against a capacity that is not constant, and where the year is already over-committed before anything new is added.

  4. The review rhythm

    Where the organisation’s reviews sit in the year, and whether they are spread or clustered.

What this touches elsewhere

  • Project management (Time Core) — Project dates have to be set against the year’s real capacity, not against the calendar.

  • Market Core — The content calendar and the seasonal moments sit inside this wheel and compete with everything else in it.

  • Business Core — Financial close, budgeting and reporting are fixed points that consume more capacity than anyone plans for.

  • Goal Core — Goal review rhythm is one of the cadences the wheel has to hold, and it is the one most often displaced.

The Omnigoal · theomnigoal.com · CC BY 4.0 · Andreas Baggesen