Time management is a waste of your time - do this instead
Time management is a billion-dollar industry. From books to seminars and workshops, apps and other tech, we spend a lot of money on time management. Just one problem – it doesn’t work! Not anymore. It is an outdated concept.
In this article, I’ll share with you why time management, in its most popular form, is a waste of your time. I will also share what you could do instead to get you better results.
Let us begin.
Image by mamit2504 from Pixabay
Time Management – a flawed concept
Most time management systems exalt (or at least assume) the approach of cramming as much activity as possible into the time available.
This concept of time management is tied closely to two flawed ideas –
the idea that productivity is tied to time spent and
the idea that all time is equal.
Let us look at how these flaws manifest.
Productivity and time – enduring relics
I believe the current approach of minute-by-minute calendar-dictated busyness is a relic of industrial age thinking. An age where profitability was measured in output /minute or hour.
Companies (factories), machines and men were profitable if they churned out enough widgets per hour to offset the cost of their own operation. Your job was simple, your profitability easily calculable right down to how many non-defective bits and bobs you processed during your shift.
Speaking of shifts, the prevailing “8-hour workday” in most of the developed world is also an inheritance from the industrial age.
And while this age gave us many wonderful things for which we are grateful, this ticking clock-centric approach to productivity has run its course and is ready for a revision based on our new reality.
A minute is not just a minute
The old time management systems are also a result of ignoring of focusing on how time works objectively and paying little attention to how time works subjectively.
Let me explain.
Yes, a minute is always 60 seconds. That is, objectively – a minute is a minute is a minute.
But a minute can feel longer or shorter depending on the individual context.
Watching a good movie? It can feel like 10 seconds. Listening to a boring speech? It can feel like 10 hours! Feeling upbeat? Time goes faster. Depressed? It crawls torturously though the ticking hand maintains a steady beat in both cases.
In these cases, a minute is not just a minute. And how the minute unfolds subjectively can make all the difference in how productive we are. Especially in this age where productivity is measured very differently than it used to be.
Things are different now
Today, as knowledge-work becomes more prevalent (and valuable), profitability and productivity are not so easily measured – less so in terms of time taken. High-value work can vary extremely in how long (or how short) a time it takes to complete. It can take weeks, months or even years to manifest a winning piece of work. And the greatest resources, more and more, are intellectual resources living in the skulls of subjective humans.
Products are now projects and time is merely the sea in which we all swim to our desired ends. We can manage time no better than a fish can manage the ocean. At best, we must orient ourselves intelligently in time if we are to survive this present age.
But the question becomes - if the fish cannot manage the ocean, what can it manage?
That is what we will discuss next.
Manage Your Energy
Your energy can make more of a difference in your output than how much time you put in as anyone who has ever missed their daily cup of morning coffee can attest to.
By placing your focus on your energy, and by extension your emotions, you can cheat time.
By intelligently maneuvering your way through your subjective experience, you can increase your productivity greatly instead of battling the clock.
By staying well fed, well rested, well challenged and matching your work to your rhythms, you will outperform colleagues with their eyes glued to their calendars.
For more on this, I recommend you read the book, The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. This book made my list of top 5 productivity books with good reason. I highly recommend it.
Now let us look at something else you can manage instead.
Manage Your Priorities
Stop trying to “make time” for more things in your life. Instead, focus on what is important to you at that point or period of your life and dedicate your energy (see above) to that.
Time management encourages us to make time for more things.
But we cannot make time for anything any more than we can make space. We simply move or remove things and presto! It appears... as anyone who has ever cleaned out their closet can attest to.
We cannot make time for anything any more than we can make space. We simply move or remove things and presto! It appears.
Your priority right now might be your health, your family or the upcoming prototype testing. Whatever it is, that is what you focus on. That is where you swim.
And the better you get at clarifying your priorities based on your beliefs, values and goals, the better you can plan, and the more productive you will be.
Question for you - what do you need to remove from your life to reveal the space you need to work in your high-priority activities?
Manage Your Projects
In today’s world, products are projects. To be product-ive, you need to get very good at managing projects. I'll bet the professional project managers are smiling at this point.
But, seriously, just as a senior executive of a large company once told me, project leadership skills are becoming a more integral part of high-value work these days. (To eavesdrop a little more our lunch conversation, read this article).
Some projects are big and will take longer. Others are smaller requiring less investment. However, projects are now ubiquitous and thinking in projects is more effective than thinking in time.
This means deliberately thinking, planning, prioritizing (remember that?) and managing ourselves (and others) to achieve the project goals. Read more on project-thinking in this short article.
Time to ditch traditional time management
Like Bob Dylan sang, the times they are a-changing.
The time has come to adopt a better model for our productivity. One which better reflects the reality of work today. A model which will help us manage ourselves and produce better results both in the short and long term.
By shifting our focus to ourselves – our energy, priorities and projects – we can make better decisions, build better practices and invest our resources in ways that yield the best results. We can work in harmony with our rhythms to meet the new demands of the modern marketplace and have a much better time of it all.
Come along for the ride – it is going to be fun.
Until the next article, do your best and be your best.
