In my experience if you give a time estimate, people make that the new metric to optimize to. So they spend 4 hours creating something that looks like 20 mins.

In my experience if you give a time estimate, people make that the new metric to optimize to. So they spend 4 hours creating something that looks like 20 mins. Most articles like this focus on what is lost for employees at the whim of a careless manager, but I think they often miss a point: the team researching X random thing means they may learn other knowledge and their overall understanding of things goes up which - though inefficient - may have value later. Moreover, work is broadly inefficient because human coordination is inefficient. People bring their own stories and narratives and goals. Hence the reason the 20min ask is now the 4 hours to make it look like 20 mins. Treating it like something that can be optimized misses the point of it.