I know someone who is always aware of time invested.
For example, if you ask, "Were you working on that document yesterday?"
he answers, "Yeah, I spent about six hours on it yesterday,"
and if you ask something like, "Work's settled down lately — has your life rhythm stabilized?"
he answers, "Yeah. I usually sleep around 10:30 and wake at 5, so I'm getting about six and a half hours."
On top of that, he used to be in securities sales, so his awareness of numbers is high.
Beyond small talk like the above, he'll have metrics in his head in classic ex-broker fashion: "Company A has XX billion in revenue, market cap XX billion, PER around XX, founder ownership XX%," and so on.
Nowadays you can usually google an answer right away, so dictionary-like knowledge doesn't have that much value — but number-based talk is easy to picture, so as a listener it's interesting.
Setting finance KPIs aside for a moment: I think it's great to have a strong sense of time invested in the work itself.
You can assume they always hold urgency and priority in mind, and they can assign work to reports in a planned way.
That said, work that must finish within two hours, or in one-hour blocks, isn't that common in my case.
I usually decide what to do by day or week and execute by that day's priorities. Of course there are things that must wrap as fast as possible within 30 minutes to an hour — but setting invested time in advance isn't asked of me that often.
Still, in retrospectives you can check "this is taking way too long," so I think you do need to stay aware of which work you're pouring resources into day to day.
Either way, work is about how you invest the resources of your head and body, and skills improve along with that — so there's nothing better than grasping the present accurately.
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