Talking to time is a critical business skill. If you've ever overrun on a conference schedule, you'll have endured the jibes of your fellow speakers who'll have had to adjust their content length. This and many more issues are discussed in our executive public speaking courses in London.
‘Take control of your life’ can sound like good advice, but such statements are philosophically empty because they can’t be properly defined. Why? Because they involve managing time.
All forms of media promise a better, less stressful life if we all focus on doing less. Or on doing more in less time. The reality is different because we’re also urged to fill every bit of our day with some activity or other. People, and not just those who suffer from OCD, are obsessed with time - and people are also obsessed with managing it. We are encouraged to be obsessed with time whether socially, at home, and certainly at work. At work, timekeeping is synonymous with hard work - a Victorian dictum but still apposite in many parts of the world.
There are fierce debates between those who say nothing really works to help manage time and those who swear by their low-tech Moleskines or higher-tech iPads. There are those who can’t live without their time management apps, online tools, or management books and experts. Whatever the system or device, each seems to start on a hopeful note but often ends on a sour one.
Time-management tools, books, and courses offer us all the promise that we can gain greater and more certain control over our lives. But we despair because, even with the best of intentions, the ideas work for a while, then stop - either from a lack of persistence or because the system doesn’t allow for human differences.
There are hundreds of time management approaches out there, from straightforward to-do lists to complicated computer or Internet-generated services with dozens of features. Most universities and colleges offer some form of time-management course, and there are dozens of companies that make big money by selling time-management solutions in-house.
Searching for a technique that works leaves many people frustrated, anxious, and, of course, guilty – the opposite of the stress-free productivity that time management is supposed to achieve. The available evidence suggests that these tools and strategies work for some people in some settings, but not for others – and, in most cases, not for long for anyone. Why? Because we all manage and see time differently. And also, most techniques suit the developer more than anyone else.
So, what is it that frustrates so many people about time management? And is there a better way to deal with time? Most of us frequently ask ourselves if we’re really as productive as we can be. However, do we think that, if we were able to do more, then we would do more? Research has it that, at best, the answer is ‘maybe’, and on the whole, it’s ‘no’.
Pursuing productivity for its own sake is why many people get frustrated with time-management tools. They can become counter-productive. Self-imposed pressure is the reason why many people get frustrated with time. It’s the same reason why their time management is poor in the first place. Most of us have the idea that time-management ideology, whatever it is, must work. We’re told that it must work. Those with more seniority than us tell us it must work. And, of course, we’re often taught to constantly try hard to outperform ourselves - and our peers.
When people do try to increase their productivity, they’re most likely to add more tasks to their workload and end up where they started. Or worse, of course. This is a self-defeating strategy. Most people feel they can complete more tasks when they start using time-management theory or tools, but they don’t realise they can’t keep increasing their workload forever. It’s a bit like dieting. In a few weeks, most people may well be more productive, yes, but still frustrated – either because they know that they can’t sustain what they’re doing or because they’re not actually being more productive. The real problem is that they are becoming overworked and overburdened, and there are no solutions to time management.
Another consequence of time-related non-productivity is that it often makes people lose track of their real motivation. Most of us rely on willpower or instruction (i.e. orders) to succeed. Willpower is only as good as the ability to sustain the approach (like a diet, again), and motivation has to be fed and encouraged, without which it’s tough to keep going.
Emotion plays a big part in time management. Most people want to feel loved or, at least, liked more than they want to feel productive. Social media, for example, is good at promising to make us feel good. Don’t we all check out how many likes we get in a post or a tweet? Don’t we all worry if we don’t get a reply to a message or email within seconds or minutes? As mentioned, guilt is another driver pushing us all to do more in the time we have. With guilt comes pressure, and with pressure comes stress and failure to achieve. Failure can be positive because we learn from mistakes, but failure in time management is never regarded as positive or helpful. It’s a negative.
Why, then, is there an overall expectation to do more and more? Most office workers today (and certainly those at the executive level) have some freedom to organise much of their own time and, with that, ironically, comes a lot of pressure. Freedom in an executive role is matched by responsibility: you have to think a lot more about how you manage your time in order to a) do your job, b) be seen to be doing your job, c) show your boss and peers that you can cope doing your job, d) deliver first-class outputs and e) make you feel that you’re indispensable to the organisation. Interestingly, happiness doesn’t factor. Being busy means to most people being needed. That’s a strong emotional rationale, but it helps us a little in managing our time well.
A big issue is that many people in many organisations worldwide have no real clue as to precisely what they should be doing with 100% of their working time. When companies strip out layers of management or swathes of employees for whatever reason, research has it that, by and large, little difference is made to the output or productivity of that organisation. The notion of not knowing what an executive should be doing with all their time is, of course, one of the core reasons people want to be invited to as many meetings as possible. Most executives’ diaries are meetings-heavy. Should they be at all of those meetings? Research suggests the answer is a big ‘definitely not’. Activities like other people’s meetings that they attend (because they want to, think they need to, or are frightened not to) take away responsibility for time accountability. Again, attending meetings means profiling, and profiling counts towards the need to be needed.
Many professionals have to juggle multiple projects, as well as the demands of family and social life. It’s easy to drop the ball - and we all do that from time to time. However, in the process of dropping not just one but maybe several balls, people feel unproductive, feel that they’ve failed, feel apologetic and guilty, rarely seek help, pile on more work, and feel unproductive again. At the least, they will feel dissatisfied and, not that infrequently, depressed.
One solution, as we are often told, is to be ultra-clear about priorities. Not vague, but with absolutely pinpoint precision. That allows us to adapt what we do to match our priorities. But there’s no one-size-fits-all here. Life just isn’t like that. Some people are more conscious of time than others: they have a better awareness of how much of it they will spend on a particular task – or will need to spend. Others are prone to be optimistic when budgeting time. This is a common fallacy and is a pitfall, particularly if some of our tasks are ‘nice’ and some ‘less nice’. We choose ‘nice’ every time until we’re forced to tackle the ‘less nice’. In addition, budgets often go out the window as soon as something stops us from working within the set budget or disrupts it.
Many of us prefer to do one thing at a time, while others feel comfortable juggling multiple tasks. Again, one size definitely won’t fit all. The norms and expectations about time vary widely across workplaces and cultures. The most recurring issue for many in most organisations is the daily mess on our desks. That can be metaphorical and/or real. After a short while, the desk remains a mess as we pile on the tasks and the never-completed paperwork. That leads people to tackle only the most recently requested tasks, and, of course, those in the queue get ignored or forgotten entirely. Some will argue that forgotten tasks can’t have been that important in the first place - much as is the case with documents that are filed in a cabinet. However, how would you feel if a team member asked you for the critical research which was yours to deliver, and its non-delivery had stopped a project dead in its tracks? What would that mean to you, and how would you feel as a colleague?
Some people are great believers in short bursts of task activity, but our days may not run that way. Companies like Apple, Google, and Adobe, among other technology giants, find this kind of approach useful – and some businesses insist on it. They argue that short bursts of work are highly productive, and they encourage staff to do all sorts of other things in between.
Flexibility is the core aspect of managing time. People will not always get everything done, and that’s OK, but whatever OK means to an organisation has to be accepted by that organisation. It means accepting that those occasional failures - and not always meeting schedules - are OK. Or, better, OK may mean managing things so that failure is less likely (through training, instruction, and enough time) and that schedules are realistic (allowing enough time, thereby ensuring success and fewer errors).
Some would say that we should be able to manage our own time easily. Some businesses assign a task or project to a team or group and then ask that team or group to estimate how long it will take. Management may seek a better answer, and compromise may prevail, but at least the team must manage how the target delivery is met. That seems a fairer way of distributing tasks and the time it takes to do them. Businesses that operate this way often claim that productivity remains high.
Remember that productivity is not an endless race, just a tool with limits. Therefore, it’s worth trying to establish if what’s expected of you is reasonable. That requires negotiation, and of course, it’s not always possible to do things according to your own wants. Negotiation is also often not an option. Reports are essential for all sorts of reasons; on Tuesday morning, a full pitch with visuals has to be rewritten by tomorrow afternoon, and a calculation has to be rechecked in a lab by yesterday. There are many reasons why pressure mounts and time is not our own to manage. But these examples should be the exception, not the rule. If any business exists on the rule alone, then something will snap, and it could be you.
And that’s where the holy grail sits really. The holy grail is you. There is one thing we can do to have a healthier relationship with work: we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves. There’s a lot of pressure to always do more, sometimes within ridiculous time scales. If that’s occasional, well, so be it – that’s life. But if it’s regular, something is wrong. It’s hard to push back because either we don’t have the power to do that (and it’s scary to contemplate, so we say yes), or we think that saying no smacks of failure. That leads to a failed or incomplete task and self-criticism; self-criticism is terrible for our ability to succeed and be productive. Self-criticism triggers a stress response, and the part of our brain we need for time management goes offline. Anxiety takes the place of sense and sensibility. Less gets done, not more.
We can't manage time; we manage ourselves in time. Time is a measurement, and we can't control its quantities. They’re finite. No matter what you do, you can’t create more time. We can only control what we do in time. But we can’t always do that because we’re managed by what others want or need to do in time.
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