DIVERSIFY AND DEEPEN TIME USAGE
If you’ve ever seen movies from the ’50s depicting life in large corporate offices, you probably were horrified. Anyone who wasn’t an executive sat in enormous bullpen-like areas at desks organized classroom-fashion. They were expected to arrive promptly at 9:00 a.m., were given one break for coffee before lunch, and were watched with hawklike vigilance by supervisors. They often had time cards, punching in and out so management could track their hours. The work was frequently monotonous—innovation, disruption, and agility were not on anyone’s radar—and deadlines were sacrosanct.
We’ve made great strides since that era and have “loosened up” workplaces in many ways, including work-hour flexibility and flattened organizations. Despite these strides, we are still obsessed by time management, and in a spreadsheet-dominant era, we can use digital tools to track employee behavior by the minute. If you type “time management” into a Google search, you get almost 2.5 billion results.
Historically, time management has been an organizational obsession. Legendary management guru Peter Drucker said, “Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.”1 From the early 1900s, when Fredrick Winslow Taylor pioneered time studies and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth conducted their time-motion studies, time management has been a business holy grail.2
Today, management of time has been taken to an entirely new level, from gathering input with sensors on delivery trucks that measure driver behaviors to analyzing output through state-of-the-art visual dashboards that compile and interpret data.
The heart of business beats to the inner metronome of time management with quarterly results, monthly management meetings, weekly status updates, daily outcomes, and hourly monitoring. This underlying beat of business often turns into a beast that oppresses our ability to be truly productive by replacing outcome with activity as we check in and check out, build our calendars around a rhythm of mundane meetings, and issue or read periodic reports that are cascaded up and down the organization.
In most spreadsheet-dominant organizations, time confines us to our routines rather than opening us up to new possibilities. More specifically, here is how time has a prisonlike effect on our work behaviors:
WE ARE CONTROLLED BY OUR INBOXES AND OUR OVERSTUFFED CALENDARS. Our calendars are packed to the gills with dull or routine meetings, and we let our inboxes or social media feeds colonize our minds and determine what we pay attention to and how and when we react.
WE CONFUSE ACTIVITY WITH ACHIEVEMENT, BUSYNESS WITH PRODUCTIVITY. We hustle and bustle. We boast of how packed our agendas are. We overschedule and we multitask. Part of this is due to increased workloads, reduced staffs, and constant incoming of signals, but a lot of it is our fear of the silence and the empty calendar. We might have time to think and maybe we are afraid of thinking. And if we do not have a packed calendar but instead swaths of unprogrammed time, we worry that maybe we are less relevant to our organizations and missing important things.
WE FOCUS ON WHAT HAS TO BE DONE VERSUS WHAT WE SHOULD DO. We narrowly define work as the tasks we are assigned and the expectations that must be met because we respond to how organizations define our jobs. As a result, we end up reliving every workday and they all blend into one. Work begins to resemble an assembly line of parts and pieces, even when we have white-collar and managerial positions.
Put another way, people who are obsessed with managing time can be narrowly focused individuals who dread certain job tasks, watch the clock, work at their desks, and rarely wander away—or into—anything that is not necessary. Organizations need to free their people from the tyranny of time and help them use time in a diversified manner. If they succeed, employees are more likely to look forward to work and find time flying by, instead of being rarely at their desks and all over the company and the digital world in search of new challenges and learning.
Playing with Time
Jeff Bezos of Amazon provides a good model for treating time with flexibility and creativity. Two Wired articles capture his time philosophy:
“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people, but if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”3
Bezos spends hours at a time thinking about the future: trawling for ideas, exploring his own site, sometimes just surfing the Web, particularly on Mondays and Thursdays, which he tries to keep unscheduled. “I catch up on email, I wander around and talk to people, or I set up my own meetings—ones that are not part of the regular calendar.”4
Bezos thinks long term and refuses to be pinned down to the vagaries of quarterly and annual calendars. He also keeps looking for new stimuli to ensure that he is not falling into a rut or being “handled” by calendar keepers.
Organizations should take a cue from Bezos and help their people approach time in a similarly flexible and creative manner. To guide their efforts, they should keep the following four traits of time-savvy employees in mind:
1. Be disciplined about being undisciplined. They always find time to get off the grid and the programming. Just as some of the most memorable travel happens when tourists are not limited by the preplanned itinerary, the best learning happens unexpectedly. Bill Gates famously schedules a “think week,” in which he goes off with books to ruminate and ponder.5 This facilitates using time in diverse ways.
2. Expose themselves to as many stimuli in a given time period as possible. They seek out different people, surf the web as if they’re free associating, and browse all sorts of online sites and books and articles. They walk around. They seek out new experiences. Again, they use their time to pursue a variety of ideas and activities.
3. Be intensely focused and present in the moment, and at the same time thinking very long term. I call this “bifocal” time management. These individuals pay attention to details and stimuli in the short term while also thinking about how to process and understand the impact of these details and stimuli in the long term. They focus on the matters at hand, but they also consider future implications and tangential subjects.
4. Understand the difference between the urgent and the important. Dwight Eisenhower noted that “what is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”6 These individuals aren’t constantly in crisis deadline mode, grasping that if they treat everything like an immediate emergency, they’ll miss out on ideas and activities that can help their organizations. They can differentiate between real deadlines and those that have been artificially created by machines and systems. These people create more diverse time for themselves because they don’t become fixated on illusory due dates.
Time Is Not Our Own
If you were to survey people in your organization about whether they’re using their time efficiently and effectively, most would probably admit they’re not (assuming that they wouldn’t be punished for their honesty). It’s not that they’re goofing off or don’t know how to be efficient and effective in their work; it’s that they are straitjacketed by policies, deadlines, paperwork, and monitoring. They possess so little flexibility relative to what they work on and how they work on it that they become robotic in their use of time—they know they must complete project A by Wednesday, that their boss expects a report on Friday, that their work is being monitored via their digital devices.
If you’ve ever had problems with your computer and given an online technician permission to view your screen, you’re aware of how intrusive this technology can be. The Big Brother–like sense that your every move is being watched tends to make you acutely aware of how you’re spending your time. More than that, it makes you reluctant to do things that may not seem relevant to the task at hand. You don’t want to spend an hour exploring a seemingly tangential subject or creating a proposal for your boss that is unrelated to your primary assignment. You don’t research an emerging market that is outside of your direct area of responsibility. Whether the fear is justified doesn’t matter; you perceive that a “watcher” will think you’re not doing your work, and this fear circumscribes how you spend your time.
One company that surveyed their people about how they use their time is consulting giant McKinsey. In November 2013, they surveyed 1,374 executives around the globe on how they spent their time and found that only 9 percent of the respondents were “very satisfied” with their use of time, while fewer than half were “somewhat satisfied,” and about one-third were “actively dissatisfied.” Only 52 percent of those surveyed said that the way they spent their time was aligned with their organization’s strategic priorities. Nearly half admitted that they were not concentrating sufficiently on guiding the strategic direction of the business.7
While McKinsey’s survey didn’t address the impact of a spreadsheet mentality on time use, it makes you wonder why some of the world’s best and brightest with high-paying positions are not “very satisfied” with how they’re using their time. They’re smart enough to figure out what they should be doing at work, but perhaps they lack the freedom or resources to use their daily hours as productively as they might.
The McKinsey study concluded that those who were satisfied spent their time in three areas: (1) meeting with key reports one-on-one or at clients’ offices; (2) working on solving operational issues or on long-term strategic initiatives; and (3) spending time alone, thinking and producing work.
In short, these were the areas that mattered most to satisfied employees. I would also argue that these are the areas that should matter the most to the company. Too often, however, there’s a gap between how people want to spend their time and how organizations require them to spend their time.
Meaningful Time Management Methods
Author Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”8 Work environments that fill days with routine; unmanageable workloads; constant, meaningless, or mundane meetings; and regular, oppressive monitoring signal a less-than-pleasant life in and for the company.
I have distilled six meaningful time management methods from observation, experience, and research that counteract the often meaningless ways many employees spend part of their workdays. If organizations want their people to be more productive, they should encourage the following behaviors:
ELIMINATE. The first of these methods is simplest to state and hardest to execute. For people to start using their time in a more varied and meaningful manner, they need to stop doing a lot of similar, meaningless things. Many people recognize the limitations of time and try to do as much as possible. They multitask and run around in a frenzy. Usually all they achieve is more multitasking and more frenzy. Doing more stuff is not the same as achievement.
ACTIVITY IS NOT PRODUCTIVITY. Showing how busy you are does not show how important you are. Give people permission to get rid of unessential tasks, whether it’s paperwork-related or jobs that could be done better via outsourcing, part-timers, or in other ways. Encourage people to prioritize based on what’s meaningful to them and what’s meaningful to the organization—when a task is meaningful to one or the other but not both, it’s a candidate for elimination.
FOCUS. Here is what organizations should communicate to their employees: once they have additional time, focus it on a few things versus many. Diversifying time does not mean skipping from one thing to the next like a dilettante. The more things people do, the less opportunity they have to become expert at any one of them. They should focus only on things that they can do particularly well (comparative advantage) or that have great impact or meaning for them and their organization (positive outcome). The first, comparative advantage, means prioritizing activities that they can do better than most people. To create this focus, though, people need organizational permission to delegate tasks that they don’t do as well—either internally or through outsourcing. The second, positive outcome, means concentrating time based on likely, advantageous results such as creating revenue, learning something new, helping someone else or the team get better, or having a meaningful experience.
SCALE. While your people cannot make more time, they can make their efforts more impactful through the use of scale. This is a great way not only to save time but to help people feel they are using their time in ways that possess power and significance. There are three ways to execute this strategy: leverage, coached delegation, and momentum.
• Leverage. Today technology and scheduling allow people to leverage. They can use social media with good writing and speaking skills to reach many people with whom they need to communicate and to whom they want to sell their thinking. They are not limited to small meetings and groups, especially if they’re a senior manager. Instead, they should gather folks at the right conference or meeting versus repeating themselves ad infinitum.
• Coached delegation. One of the best ways to scale is to delegate tasks to others with direction and coaching. If others become good at this task, it’s like you’ve cloned yourself; you imbue others with the input and direction necessary for them to do as you would do.
• Momentum. The trend is your friend. To avoid wasting time, understand the underlying trend that is driving the firm or the business and, in most cases, align with it. The world is going global. The world is going digital. Every company has a built-in DNA. If they are going to go against the flow, they need to prepare for loss of time as well as resistance. I am not suggesting to go along with every trend, especially leaders and managers—if you believe strongly in an alternative, fight for it. Just be aware that you’ll need to prepare a great argument and enlist others to win the battle, and that it’s not going to be easy.
DO NEW THINGS; TATTOO THE MOMENT. Day-to-day repetition of tasks and calendar scheduling creates boredom and robs people of their creativity; they try to get through the day rather than make the most of it. New experiences deepen time and create more diverse work tasks—people who take on stretch assignments or volunteer for new training make their work time memorable because they’re engaged in something fresh and different. New experiences stretch your people, helping them learn and grow as employees, managers, and leaders. These experiences can be as simple as attending a conference they’ve never attended or volunteering for work on a new, diverse team. It may be taking on a big challenge or creating a new project for themselves or their teams. The new experience, if it’s sufficiently successful (or even if it’s a spectacular failure) will tattoo itself in people’s memory. They can draw on it and learn from it; it is time well spent.
GIVE TIME TO OTHERS. Donating time to direct reports, bosses, customers, suppliers, or trade associations is another method to increase the meaning and diversity of workdays. When people mentor others, for instance, they feel their time is purposeful, that they’re appreciated. They can tolerate the time they may have to spend on a necessary-but-boring task because they are infusing their time with an activity about which they care that varies from the routine. Developing people, providing assistance to a client, helping a trade organization, doing pro bono work—all this is a generous use of time that benefits the individual as well as the larger entity.
Facilitating Better Ways to Use Time
An employee’s time is not their own. Work has to be done, and not just at work. We have to juggle responsibilities at home and everyday living. Deadlines have to be met. No one can just do what they want when they want.
While companies can’t allow employees to eliminate whatever they want to focus on whatever they choose, they can be far more sensitive to time pressures by finding ways to change organizational philosophies toward time management:
ASSESS ALL MEETINGS TO ELIMINATE ONES THAT WASTE TIME OR WHOSE TASKS COULD BE HANDLED MORE EFFICIENTLY IN ANOTHER SETTING. In the next chapter, I’m going to advocate for more meetings of significance and substance. Unfortunately, the majority of meetings are inefficient and boring. Here’s a radical amendment to this policy: Cancel all meetings and start with a blank sheet of paper. Then assess which meetings are the best ones in the organization—the ones that feature lively discussions, diverse viewpoints, disruptive ideas, and productive outcomes. Of these premium meetings, assess the minimum number of times they should be held in a year with the minimal number of attendees and the maximum acceptable gaps. “Bad meeting creep” is a problem for most organizations, and this approach may be the best way to stop meetings from being a time suck.
CONSIDER TIME A FINITE RESOURCE AND BUDGET FOR IT LIKE YOU WOULD BUDGET MONEY. Every time an organization funds a new initiative from a fixed budget, they eliminate the budget of some other program. Why not do the same with the allocation of time? Whenever a new meeting or initiative is added to the calendar, identify what gets canceled or reduced. Resources aren’t infinite, even intangible ones like time. Organizations cannot keep launching new initiatives and projects without paying a price—people will be overwhelmed and overbooked and won’t have enough time to focus on what matters most.
ESTABLISH ELECTRONIC-FREE TIME PERIODS. This isn’t just my idea; some companies already designate time during the day—or an entire day—when electronic media use is forbidden or discouraged. Yes, people can look at their emails and texts for critical messages, but a general understanding exists that during certain time periods, digital messages won’t be answered or sent. This policy frees up people’s time to try new things, to focus on key tasks, and so on.
Diversify Time Based on Goals
In the 1990s, a new productivity tool called the Pomodoro Technique became popular. It called for twenty-five minutes of intense work toward a goal, followed by a five-minute break. After the break, people had the option of returning to the existing task or moving on to a different project. After five Pomodoro repetitions, the technique mandated an hour break.9
The Pomodoro seems designed more for individual than team work and also doesn’t take into account modern business realities. But if the technique isn’t directly applicable, its principles are even more relevant today than years ago. Specifically, this technique suggests the following principles: (1) a single-task focus is more productive than multitasking, (2) humans work best in short spurts with breaks to recover, and (3) we should strive for a diversity of tasks over time versus at the same time, breaking up a job routine and considering various tasks comparatively.10
These principles, though, work only if they are tied to well-designed goals. Here is how to create time-sensitive goals:
ORGANIZE A LIMITED NUMBER OF GOALS INTO TWO SETS. Determine short (daily and weekly) or mid-term (monthly or quarterly) goals for up to six tasks or objectives. Having a list of more than a dozen (six short and six mid-term) goals means either too many goals have been listed and they become unachievable or they will produce a lot of switching between tasks and making lists or monitoring goals. Diversifying time is good; overdiversifying is bad. An overabundance of goals overwhelms people. Some goals will need more time (usually the important ones or ones that facilitate growth) and some less time (usually the urgent ones and the ones that must be done but rarely promote growth).
FIND THE SWEET SPOT BETWEEN SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM GOALS. A list of goals should not be just about getting work done. While these are important to include, they are insufficient by themselves. People should spend some of their time getting better, not just getting work done. Allocating 20 percent of one’s month to enhancing and expanding skills is manageable. This may include attending training sessions, going to conferences, helping colleagues so you can learn what they are working on, and reading or visiting websites that help grow skills. Employees can best give to their companies by giving to themselves. By growing their skills, they not only become more valuable to the company but are more likely to stay longer because their growing skills are relevant and rewarded.
This is how I have learned to manage my time over the years. I allocate time into four buckets:
1. Client work. Projects specific to clients, including meetings and presentations. This tends to take up about a third of my time.
2. Corporate work. Since I was part of management and often worked on our strategies and broader overall objectives, this takes another third of my time.
3. Learning. I try to set aside 20 percent of my time over a week (the equivalent of one day a week or an hour or two daily) to learning, ensuring my skills continue to be relevant. It would be hard for me to be useful to clients or inform our corporate strategy without keeping abreast of key advancements in technology, strategy, competitors, and clients. This learning time is not limited to just work-related topics and includes things that will help me become more innovative or be stimulated to think differently—going to museums, seeing new films, attending university lectures, and so on.
4. Giving back, mentoring, teaching. One of the ways I can be of help to our company is to teach others, either one-on-one or in groups. I communicate what I have learned about my field and managing a career. Teaching and guiding people is often the best way to scale since you are now teaching people to fish rather than fishing yourself.
Finally, be aware that this is not a static process. Once I diversify my time based on my goals, I often have to recalibrate and rebalance the activities to which I’ve allocated my hours, based on emerging realities.
Situations change. A sudden customer crisis, the realization that a new skill will soon be crucial, the restructuring of a team or department—all of this can affect people’s goals and priorities. Therefore, organizations need to make sure that people reassess their goals and time allotments monthly or even weekly. Diversifying time is similar to diversifying investments; rebalancing the portfolio is essential.
Quality Versus Quantity
As I wrote this chapter, I thought about how productivity-obsessed leaders might respond. In an era where organizations are trying to do more with less, some companies are attempting to wring every single second of work from every employee.
A company’s productivity is defined as output divided by input, and one of the key inputs is time. Therefore, one way of increasing productivity is to increase output per unit of time. It is a key variable monitored by many manufacturing and certain service businesses (e.g., call centers that measure the number of phone calls a service agent completes in an hour). Less formally, other organizations focus on incentivizing their people to work longer hours for rewards and recognition.
This measure frequently fails to capture the quality of the product or service, as opposed to the quantity of the product and service. Particularly in the service sector, which is now more than half the economy of advanced countries, the degree of variability of output is particularly extreme and more is not necessarily better.
Many experts have believed productivity came through focus and repetition. Just as increased practice and monomaniacal focus make for an improved athlete, it makes for a more productive employee—or so the thinking goes. While this may be true for some manufacturing companies and service providers, focusing on repetition has a negative effect on productivity for the following reasons:
• Customization is often a key to quality of product. Imagine a hairdresser who cut everyone’s hair the same.
• Constant repetition of a task leads to burnt-out or bored employees, increasing turnover and its negative impact on productivity.
• Collaboration makes superior service possible in a connected world; varying and adjusting collaborations to fit customer needs and markets helps boost productivity, while a single-minded focus and universal repetition does not.
• Competition usually comes from outside one’s industry, where new ways of doing things can change the game. This was true even in manufacturing, where Toyota’s new “just in time” inventory approach plus close collaboration—with suppliers and between employees—upended the traditional, focused assembly-line approach of US car manufacturers.
• Computerization and robotics allow machines to handle repetitive tasks, giving humans the time to deal with sensitive issues, handle emotion-related concerns, or customize responses.
For both organizations and employees, increasing the depth, quality, and variability of work ensures increased productivity and job security. This won’t happen, however, if organizations don’t actively invest in programs and policies that encourage quality as well as quantity.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• It is a mistake to allocate and measure time only in economic or numeric ways. The quality of how people spend their time is as important as the quantity of what they produce during that time.
• Successful people do not allow the vagaries of calendars or incoming emails to determine their days but rather have technologies or practices that allow them to allocate their time to things that are important to them.
• To get the most out of time, organizations need to sanction doing less and open spaces to do nothing.