Underwriting time debt: Is your calendar more dangerous than your CAT model?

For most teams I meet, the honest answer is uncomfortable.

The math we do not want to run

Across the economy, the numbers are brutal. Asana's Anatomy of Work Index found that knowledge workers spend about 60% of their time on "work about work" like status meetings, chasing updates, searching for information and switching between tools. Over a year that adds up to roughly 103 hours in unnecessary meetings, 209 hours on duplicative work, and 352 hours just talking about work rather than doing it.

Middle managers are not immune. McKinsey estimates that managers spend nearly half their time on nonmanagerial work and about a full workday each week on administrative tasks.

In commercial insurance the picture is even starker. One study of P&C carriers found that the average underwriter spends only about 30% of the day on true underwriting, with roughly 40% going to low value administrative tasks and another 30% to negotiation, sales support and internal coordination.

If you translate that into capacity, a 100-person underwriting organization is really operating like a 30-person shop when it comes to actual risk selection and pricing. The rest is "time debt" or hours borrowed by broken processes and tool sprawl that have to be repaid with overtime, burnout or missed opportunities.

A little like The Office, unfortunately

If you have ever watched an episode of The Office where an entire day gets consumed by planning a birthday party, you know the feeling. Everyone is busy. Almost nothing that matters gets done. The only difference is that the underwriter's team doesn't do that willingly.

Underwriting often looks similar in slow motion across organizations:

• A submission arrives.
• Someone forwards it to the "right" inbox.
• A spreadsheet gets created.
• Someone else rekeys data into a policy system.
• Slack pings, Teams messages, internal emails, side threads.

By the time an underwriter actually reads the loss runs, three different people have touched the account and no one can quite remember who owns it.

This is not an intelligence problem. It is a stage problem. In a good orchestra, the musicians walk on to find their chairs set, music laid out and sound checks done so they can focus on the performance. In many underwriting shops, the violinist is still moving chairs when the concert is supposed to start.

Why time debt matters more than your loss ratio dashboard

Every CUO I know can quote their combined ratio to a decimal place. Very few can tell you, with the same precision, the average hours from submission to first meaningful underwriting touch.

Yet the latter quietly drives the former.

Like I mentioned earlier, when 70% of underwriter time is spent on non-underwriting work, several things happen at once:

• Hit ratio erodes because you are not the first meaningful quote on small accounts where speed is everything.
• Case quality suffers because complex risks do not get enough deep thinking before block placements or referrals.
• Burnout creeps in because days are packed but rarely satisfying.

Time debt is the underwriting version of carrying a high-interest credit card balance. You can ignore it for a quarter or two. Eventually, the interest shows up in your loss ratio, your broker NPS and your regretted attrition.

Three questions I now ask every underwriting leader

Over the last few years, after sitting with underwriters from regional mutuals to global carriers, I have started asking a simple set of questions. None of them involve AI, cloud or core systems. They are about time.

1. What counts as underwriting in your calendar? Most teams have never defined this. Reading and interpreting loss runs. Evaluating external risk signals. Structuring a deal. Talking to a broker about risk, not about missing forms. That is underwriting. Copy-pasting data between systems is not. Internal "what is the status of X" meetings are not.
Until you name that line, you cannot protect it.

2. Do you measure hours to insight, not just hours to quote? We love "quote turn time" as a metric. It is important, but incomplete. What really matters is the time from submission arriving to an underwriter having a clean, trusted view of the risk. If that takes two days, shaving thirty minutes off rating does not change much.

Cross-industry research on productivity keeps coming back to the same pattern: The bottleneck is rarely the final step. It is the invisible hours lost to searching, stitching and clarifying.

3. Where does context switching live in your org chart? On paper, no one owns "answering endless Teams messages" or "digging through six systems to see if this account is already quoted." In practice, that is where a shocking amount of underwriter energy goes.

A recent study found that the average employee uses 10 different apps a day, and that more apps correlate with more distraction and procrastination.nullIn insurance, those apps sit on top of legacy cores and bespoke tools. The human brain is the integration layer. That is expensive integration.

A small experiment to start paying down time debt

If you are a CUO, here is a very boring, very powerful experiment.
Pick five underwriters. Ask them to block one normal day on their calendar two weeks from now. On that day, have them track their time in fifteen-minute increments. No judgment. Just categories.

• Underwriting analysis
• Broker or client conversation about risk
• Internal coordination
• Administration and rekeying
• Hunting for information

The results can be eye-opening. People already feel busy. Seeing the actual breakdown on paper turns a vague frustration into a concrete problem statement.

You do not need a new platform to start from there. Often, the first wins are surprisingly human. Shorter status meetings. Cleaner intake rules. Clearer handoffs. A shared definition of what deserves uninterrupted time.

Technology can and should help, but it will not fix a calendar that still treats underwriter attention as an infinite resource.

The older I get, the more I think about my dad at his small agency, staying late to clean up paperwork so he could be free to think about his clients the next day. Underwriters today face a much more complex world, but the core tension is the same.

We cannot control the market cycle. We can control how much of the day is spent doing the work only underwriters can do.

In an era obsessed with AI, that might be the most underrated competitive advantage left.

Opinions are the author's own.

(Photo credit: Quality Stock Arts/Adobe Stock)

About the author:
Akash Agarwal is the Founder and CEO of Pibit.AI, an SF-based insurtech company building underwriting infrastructure for commercial carriers and MGAs across the U.S. He leads the team behind CURE™, a unified underwriting decision framework designed to bring clarity, structure, and transparency to modern underwriting. Akash was one of the earliest proponents of applied AI in insurance, founding Pibit.AI in 2020, well before the wave of commoditized AI tools that followed years later. His work and perspective have since been
featured in publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur, and CNBC, among others, and he is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in the AI category.

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