Most of us also operate in sleep deficit. Current studies show that the average North American adult needs between eight and ten hours of sleep per night.¹ Some might need less, but an easy way to determine if you’re getting enough sleep is this: If you need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning, that means you are not waking up naturally, which means your sleep cycle isn’t in tune with your day. If you wake up Monday morning having had one hour of sleep less than you need, then you are in sleep deficit. If the same thing happens on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, by the time you get to Friday, you’re short five hours of sleep. Then, by trying to compensate by sleeping in on Saturday morning, you throw off your rhythm even further. (The best solution is to get up at the same time every day, and go to bed at the same time every night.)

Sleep deficit is another example of the disparity between our perceptions of our actions and abilities within time and the reality. We are fighting battles with ourselves, physically, chemically, emotionally, and intellectually every second of the day.

By the way, there is a better solution to sleep deficit than merely going to bed earlier, and that’s to introduce higher quality sleep more quickly through the proper use of “downtime.” We’ll cover this in Chapter 12.

THE CIRCULAR WORLD

Meanwhile, the rotations of days, nights, seasons, tides, and the moon continue without fail. The plants and trees of the world breathe and release carbon dioxide every twenty-four hours, while large-scale weather patterns ferry moisture, cold, and warmth from one part of the globe to another. The planet itself seems to be breathing, living, and playing to its own vast cadence.

This innate sense of rhythm then influences our perception of time, so that it too seems to have a rhythmic or circular pattern. Clocks repeat the same numbers every twelve hours. We have only seven days of the week, so each comes around regularly. New Year’s Day also comes around once a year, the Olympic Games every four years, and so on. Circularity allows society to structure itself with predictability and standardization. It would be extremely difficult for any society to continue without it. But all that next Tuesday has in common with this Tuesday is its name, nothing more.

Our vernacular is full of phrases that enliven time and make it a real commodity. Expressions such as “I haven’t got the time,” or “Time flies,” or “Where did the day go?” give time an elasticity that doesn’t exist. We talk about people “wasting time,” “spending time,” “killing time,” “managing time,” as if it were a substance to be bought, sold, and reused. Everyone knows these are harmless sayings, but they, too, place the blame and the responsibility for change squarely on the shoulders of time itself. We have convinced ourselves that we could have, or should have, or actually do have control over time, and we find ourselves mystified when the truth comes out.

Though it is convenient to match our calendar with the annual rhythms of the seasons, and to objectify time as a tangible object, we should take more care to see ourselves as we really are—marching in a straight line, advancing along our own finite section of an eternal straight line like ants on a ruler.

OSMOSIS AND FOOTBALL IN THE WORKPLACE

Humans are also by nature social creatures, so we tend to invite and enjoy conversation, distraction, and mental stimulation: the joke-of-the-day e-mail from a friend, the water-cooler chat, a brief stint of surfing the web. These things can be effective in enlivening the day and providing a few moments of leisure, but they do come with a price, for after they have passed, the work still remains to be done, and we are then forced to stay late, take work home, or make other sacrifices to catch up.

Furthermore, as products of our Western education system, most of us are trained in a skill and then join the workforce. We continue to learn though training and professional development courses, as well as practical experience, hopefully building a stable career and putting food on the table. However, another, more sinister type of learning also happens. While we integrate ourselves into the corporate culture of the company, we start to adopt the habits and norms of our peers, including many latent, long-established time inefficiencies that are passed on through osmosis.

It takes us by surprise, therefore, when we learn for the first time that most people “work” for only about one-third of the hours that they spend “at work,” meaning they actually will get only three hours of measurable work done in an eight- or nine-hour day.² Though this at first seems to be an affront to our ambitions, it doesn’t actually refer to a lack of dedication or drive. The average business day is full of productivity roadblocks such as meetings, e-mail, and drop-in visitors, conflicts and staff issues, technological problems and crises, all of which, though they may be considered as part of the work for which we are being paid, occur in irregular and unpredictable ways, breaking up the momentum of work and delaying tasks on our calendar. The difference between how much we think we’ve done and how much work we have actually achieved is surprising.

But three hours? That’s a small fraction of a day to be counted as productive work in the purest sense of the word. It’s like taking a stopwatch to a football game. Over the course of a four-hour game, between the downs, the line changes, and the time-outs, the ball is actually only in play for about twenty minutes—a very small segment of the game’s entire span.

Numerous polls of North American professionals have revealed that for many, during the course of a workday, these things happen:

• 25 percent of people’s time is spent doing actual work

• 15 percent of the day is spent responding to e-mail and voicemail

• 15 percent of the day is spent on the phone

• 20 percent of the day is spent in meetings and conversations

• 25 percent of the day is spent preparing for those meetings or dealing with the follow-up

The fact that such a relatively small amount of the workday is spent doing actual planned work is often overlooked until someone is called upon to estimate the delivery date of a project. In an attempt to please a potential new client, you, your boss, or your salesperson might say, “We can have that to you by Thursday.” In fact, if you had nothing else to do, and could work on this client’s needs exclusively for eight uninterrupted hours a day, you probably could have it ready for Thursday. But that’s being way too optimistic, and that’s where the problems happen. We have to be realistic, and even a little bit pessimistic. We don’t know what other crises might happen between now and Thursday, but we can count on a few simple truths:

• Things always take longer than you think, and a lot longer than you hope.

• If someone asks you to do something and includes the word “just,” as in “Can you just ...?” you’re already in trouble.

• There’ll never be a perfect time to get it done.

• No matter how many good things you do for a person, he’ll always remember (and talk about) the one bad thing that happened.

WATER IN THE BUCKET

This chapter started with the story of a man and his bucket. Let’s have a last look at that bucket. A bucket can hold a fixed amount of water. Once the bucket is filled to the brim, you can try to pour more water in, but an equal amount will have to come back out. It just cannot hold any more.

Now let this bucket represent a fixed amount of time. We each have access to twenty-four hours a day, but we can’t borrow any time from previous days, nor can we ask for repeats or advances. These twenty-four-hour days come and go, regularly and unfailingly. The day is fixed in length. It is the primary working tool of our existence.

Many people start off their days with the best intentions, planning what they will do and in which order, yet things quickly start to unravel as urgencies of all sorts start to occur. The day’s schedule, which was probably already full of planned tasks, now starts to overflow. People get stressed, and they work through lunch and stay late to try to get back on top of things. They expand and distort their working day in order to keep up with the overflow of work. They wish for more hours in a day, or for time to freeze, just until they’re caught up. They’re on a quest for more time—that bigger bucket. The problem is that even with a bigger bucket, they’ll still end up working twice as hard to move half as much water.

The trick to time management, just like the trick to dealing with a flooded basement, is in learning how to use your bucket rather than trying to find a bigger one. Effective time management means using the right strategy, not making more work hours available or working twice as fast or twice as hard. Effective time managers do not feel an obsessive need to fill every moment with productive work—quite the opposite. They envision and enact a rational plan that includes time for the expected, the unexpected, and the opportunities so that in the end, every moment can be used properly and profitably. They balance priorities, and they manage the needs of their colleagues. They recognize and accept that the in-box will never be empty. They go home at the end of the day knowing that they have done good work and that they will do more tomorrow.

They understand that control makes the difference. It paves the way for influence, productivity, and satisfaction. So let’s now start on the Cool Time path to success by first taking inventory.