Time management takes too much time
Credit to Author: BEN KRITZ, TMT| Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2019 16:16:17 +0000
MOST people accept the concept of “time management” as a fundamentally good thing – particularly if one is an employer – but a recent lengthy article in The Guardian makes a strong case that time management is actually “ruining our lives.”
The article, written by Oliver Burkeman, was actually first published about three years ago, but is no less relevant now than it was then. Or for that matter, at the dawn of the 20th century when the concept of time management was first applied – and failed – in a work setting.
The article tells the story of how “efficiency” came into vogue in the business lexicon, and pinpoints its genesis to the hiring of a consultant by the Bethlehem Steel Company in 1898 to advise the company on how to get more productivity out of its workers. That effort eventually flopped; humans, as it turns out, are not machines with consistently limitless energy, and a short-term productivity gain was followed by a significant decline.
But the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, and the concepts of “productivity” and “efficiency” became ingrained in industrialized society. “Time management” as a marketable concept really took hold beginning in the 1970s with the publication of the first self-help books on the topic, and as The Guardian article points out, has been both a socioeconomic institution and a profitable business for writers with poor imaginations up to the present day.
The article makes the point, albeit in a really long-winded way, that practicing time management, which is supposed to reduce our stress and the amount of effort we need to put into individual tasks, actually does precisely the opposite. There seems to be three reasons for this, which the article, as interesting as it is, could have explained more clearly:
First, actually practicing a time management method is an additional activity that takes time. Let’s say you have three tasks to complete, and each one will ideally take an hour. However, your time management practice requires you to spend half an hour making a “to-do list,” prioritizing these tasks and determining what each one will take to complete. If that exercise results in reducing the amount of time required for each task by 10 minutes or more, it may be worthwhile, but that’s not what time management is designed to do – it’s meant to help you complete the tasks in the ideal amount of time, one hour each, instead of inefficiently dithering away at them and taking much longer. At best, your time management practice has just turned a three-hour job into a three-and-a-half hour job.
Second, even if time management works to “create time” in our work day, it does not actually reduce our labor. The Guardian article notes this well-known phenomenon, which is called Parkinson’s Law, and which states that, “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion”; it was coined by the British historian C. Northcote Parkinson in 1955. Any time that we create through becoming more efficient at our existing tasks is immediately filled with new tasks, to which we need to also apply our time management techniques, which creates more space for more work, and so on, until we find ourselves once again completely saturated.
Third, it has become increasingly ingrained in our nature that our time must be spent meaningfully. This is not a new development, as the article points out; but it seems that in the era of social media, in which we are encouraged to publicly catalog our every thought and activity, our sensitivity to how we are spending our time has become acute. This causes us additional stress and compels us to try to “manage” even more of our time, with the result that we become even more overloaded with activities and objectives.
The biggest takeaway from all of this is that time management, as a formalized activity or discipline, is likely counterproductive, and we should stop doing it. That does not mean that we should simply adopt an attitude of unconcern towards completing tasks or achieving objectives, nor that we should give up on trying to work smartly. The key is to keep it simple; managing your time should not become another task in itself. What works for you is something you will have to work out on your own, but a couple of my own personal rules might give you some ideas:
Don’t multitask. Focus on one task at a time, stay with it, and work at it steadily until it is completed or must be set aside because it requires inputs from someone else, as the case may be.
Make a to-do list, but don’t make it for any longer a period of time than that in which you can consistently complete it. Experimenting with this will give you a good sense of how much you can accomplish in a given period of time. For example, if you have 50 tasks to accomplish, make a to-do list covering one month, and then find you’ve only completed half of them by the end of the month, then your next list should only cover half that number in a two-week timeframe. If that doesn’t work, shorten the list again, and keep doing it until you find a formula of number of tasks X amount of time allotted to them that you can resolve every time. For me, it’s about three days, with three or four items per day.
Enforce your own schedule. Bosses hate this, clients hate this, but one of the best ways to ensure that you are working at your best when you need to work is to establish a personal schedule, and adhere to it like scripture. Do not work all the time. Of course, if you have a fixed schedule at a workplace that will dictate your personal schedule, but if you have flexibility, decide how much time you want to devote to work and stick to your decision. For me, even though I don’t work in an office, 8 am to 5 pm are working hours, five days a week, with one weekend day devoted to personal business, and one devoted to pure leisure.
As I said, these ideas may or may not work for you, but the point is, the best time management habits, if you need to think of them in those terms, are the ones you develop for yourself. The ones you find in books work for the people who wrote the books; not the least because they’re taking your money for them.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Twitter: @benkritz