Time Management Advice

There have been books and courses about time management for as long as I have worked.  Even when I started out, there was supposedly a crisis of excessive mail and meetings and requirements and burnouts. Since then things have only got worse, mainly thanks to pervasive technology.

I remember well my first international job, in 1993-94. I was based in London and was tasked with trying to assess which of the former communist markets of central Europe to enter, when and how and with whom. It was a lovely job, and one of my retirement dreams is to drive around those countries looking for pioneer petrol stations that I had a part in creating.

The job was a privilege, most notably for the quite exceptional talent that Shell could skim from the very top of the markets and then try to develop into leaders. I loved that aspect. But I also remember something about time management.

Business travel was civilised then, only 23 years ago. There were one or two flights per day from London to the capitals, usually at times like 11am. So my week often involved a day in the office on Monday, then a late start to get to Heathrow to fly to country on Tuesday, and once I arrived there was only time for a leisurely dinner. Wednesday involved hard work in the country, including long drives, and then Thursday was a reverse of Tuesday and Friday a repeat on Monday. At the start I don’t think I even travelled with a computer, and when I started to use one it could not capture e-mail in any way that was practical, so I was essentially isolated. I enjoyed my dinners, did some tourism and slept well. It was not lazy – I had no practical alternative.

Now of things are different. We are all on call 24/7 wherever we are and seem to be expected to reply to messages and to complete office tasks and office hours while not in the office and doing other things as well, like travelling. Just seven years after my stately introduction to international work, I had a breakdown from a job based in Oslo that was trying to cover all of Europe with twelve direct reports in eleven different countries.

This is the context for the discipline of time management, a lucrative one for many. It was the subject of a recent long article in The Guardian Weekly by the exceptional Oliver Burkeman. As well as being funny and insightful, Burkeman has let slip that he lives in New York and sings in a choir, so I am hopeful to meet him one day. I’d like to thank him personally for all the joy and sound advice he has offered me.

Burkeman spent much of his article dissecting the work of a former guru, who made his name with an idea called something like Inbox Zero. I was immediately captivated, because that is exactly how I work myself. My inbox is currently empty, and it nearly always is. I deal with things straight away whenever possible, ideally closing out rather than expanding the issue. I only reply is necessary and use reply to all very rarely. I prune my inbox nowadays by unsubscribing immediately from any marketing material I find of little value. Anything requiring processing or work moves to an early to do list and is usually closed within a day. I switch off my laptop at 6pm and never try to access e-mail from my mobile phone.

As a result, I achieve inbox zero, and feel good about it, just as I am supposed to in the theory. I feel successful, in control, efficient and with free space for what I want to do with all my life that doesn’t involve e-mail. That is what the theory says, and for a while it built many adherents.

But suddenly the founder walked away from his own lecture circuit and stopped promoting his books. He had observed something about his theory that changed his mind – for most people it did not work.

Indeed, Burkeman explains how it might make things worse for many people. Efficient people receive more requests and hoover up extra responsibilities. And acting immediately on a request precludes the happy possibility that a problem might vanish if deferred long enough.

So then Burkeman veers off of a different tangent, suggesting that we have to deal with root causes before addressing symptoms. The root cause starts with our choices about how we want to spend our time – what is important, joyful, necessary and so on.

Without this step, someone who is overloaded and then practices inbox zero will probably just ratchet up the output without freeing up any time. E-mail will simply expand to fill the time it is permitted to. Social networking is even more dangerous in this respect; it will gobble up any time we don’t guard.

So, on a weekly, monthly or annual basis, and probably all of them, we should start by deciding how we want to use our time, then take steps to make that allocation happen, at least approximately.

A good starting point is sleep, critical for staying well. Then we have family time, household chore time, leisure time, project time, reading time, mobile phone and TV time and work time. Within work time we have projects, studying, meetings, staff, personal development and keeping up with e-mails and reports.

Of course the real world will intervene and we will fail daily. But if we are smart, we won’t fail as often or as spectacularly. A key step was taught to me by Shell senior manager Paul Skinner, and it entails blocking our calendars with our own priorities. If we don’t do this, well in advance, then others will fill our calendars for us with their priorities. Occasionally, we can override and submit, to an important meeting for example. But we can make this the exception rather than the rule.

There is no need to over-manage this, don’t bother with time tracking and other time wasters. Just hold yourself accountable, be honest, and partner with a good friend if it helps.

So why don’t we all do this? A few of us have good reason to be stuck in a time hole. If we have low financial security, low job security and a vindictive boss we might not have much choice but to keep playing the game and hoping for better times ahead. But I don’t think that describes many of us. The rest of us have a whole load of conscious and subconscious excuses based on denial and delusion.

We might need the recognition from feeling indispensible. We might fear our own incompetence. We might be deluding ourselves that things will soon improve once some deadline has passed. We might be avoiding fears or issues at home or in our health. We might have fear of abandonment, irrelevance and emptiness.

These are big issues. Click-bait and drowning in e-mail feed some urges and make procrastination more likely. But of course these issues don’t improve unless we address them head on, indeed they usually just get worse. And maybe then there is a crisis and it is too late.

Apart from the period just before my breakdown, I managed to keep things in balance. I was lucky. I had good advice, usually was confident in my job, and had grounding in an age before technology. Even the breakdown turned into a blessing. But I think most of us can make our own luck on this one, if we choose to. Then, once we’ve done that bit, inbox zero can help too.

There is one more benefit to mention. When I left Shell at fifty, many people wondered how I could possibly fill my days. The reality was that I already had a lot of lovely things filling parts of my days, and I could simply expand those things to fill more time. And the laptop still gets closed down at six.       

Time for Big Brother

The Economist included a long report in an issue before Christmas, introducing a new Chinese initiative using various data sources to keep score of its citizens. The project has already had a couple of iterations and trials, and seems to be set for a wider implementation.

Citizens can score points by doing deeds perceived as beneficial to society. More often, they will be docked points, for anything from traffic misdemeanours to poor credit or late tax returns or to not visiting elderly relatives enough. Maintaining a good score entitles citizens to better jobs or other rewards.

The author of the piece was clearly horrified by the prospect, and initially so was I. But the more I thought about it the more I liked it. It is also impressive, requiring lots of data and IT connectivity, things that in the past have hampered this sort of holistic initiative – such as the UK NHS attempts to create a national health data system.

It all reeks of Big Brother, the final arrival of Orwell’s dystopia, just thirty years late. And clearly, if the system becomes an arm of autarchy and oppression then it is something to be feared. The Chinese a tinkering with penalties for criticising the state or organising protest. Clearly setting up a system whereby the only model citizen is a compliant one is not something to celebrate.

But this aside is this really something to be feared? Tellingly, the Economist author came up with the old libertarian chestnuts to justify his or her negative attitude. So, caring for parents is a private matter. But should it be? Elderly care costs are a major vulnerability for all societies in the 21st century, so the more responsible families are doing an important civic duty. The negative attitude feels to me to be rather old fashioned and masculine, the same type of thinking that confined women to centuries of unpaid work and lost opportunities.

Then there are the things like not declaring everything for tax or working in cash, portrayed as some sort of civil liberty. Rubbish! We’d all be better off if we all complied with fiscal laws all the time – and it is usually a privilege of the rich to get away with loopholes.

My first exposure to a transparent society was via living in Stockholm in the 1990’s. The Scandinavians were always way ahead of the IT curve, but also had a Lutheran sense of civic responsibility, a sort of collectivism, even close to communism as Marx originally intended it. Key to the system was a personal number and ID card, used for almost everything. In our first weeks in the country, while our requests for numbers were being processed, it was actually quite hard to get things done – as an example any credit card purchase was routinely backed and linked to the number on the ID card.

I came to love the efficiency of the system. It was used for all tax related matters and saved a lot of paperwork and reporting. A by-product was that any citizen could look up the tax details of any other, including their income. That took some getting used to, but in the end I thought – why not? You can imagine what this did for civic responsibility and against corruption.

Another example of the benefits of big citizens data is emerging in India, where a massive national database is revolutionising how benefit and subsidy disbursements are made, eliminating middlemen, waste and most corruption. In general, developing nations have the most to gain. 

A couple of years ago I mused about starting a couple of internet businesses. One of my ideas was a system of reporting courteous or disrespectful driving by text. Any driver could report any other, by typing in the vehicle licensing plate and a few categories. Some firms already do this, with “how is my driving?” stickers on the back of trucks and vans. One flaw was the temptation to text while driving, so I wondered about limiting it to passengers – but nowadays voice-based software could remedy that.

Finance could come from insurance companies or the local police or licensing bureaux. The police, in NYC at least, don’t really have resources for traffic patrols, and the benefits to insurance companies are obvious. Apart from dreams of making money, my motivation was as someone who gets frustrated by reckless or selfish drivers. Almost weekly I witness some crazy road race at double the speed limit – why should these people be free to put the lives of the rest of us at risk?

I shared the idea with some friends. Some were concerned about false positives or vindictive campaigns. But Trip Advisor and the like show this to be a false worry. The software would deal with it – multiple reports would be needed to count as valid, and reporters would also be checked as valid. The more interesting concern came from a German friend, who immediately thought of the Stasi and the historical culture of ratting on your compatriots. It is no surprise that Germany remains the most nervous about this sort of innovation. But I think the benefits outweigh the risks.

So if you fancy making money, take my idea and run with it! Once you’ve made a few million, slip me 1% and I’ll be even happier.

Another futuristic viewpoint came from the excellent Lionel Shriver in her recent novel “The Mandibles”, about a future dystopia in the US. The book is both funny and thought provoking, and somehow seems even less farfetched after the election of 2016. In the endgame, the US divides into two nations. One is bankrupt, almost all resources go to supporting the old, and everyone has an implanted memory chip auto-taxing all income at a high rate while preventing any workarounds. In the other, there is no law except the primitive superiority of power, so everyone carries guns and survives on their wits, tending to preclude support for anyone needy.

The novel brilliantly provides a logical journey to this endgame. In a way, the reader is invited to choose between the two dystopias. I found this a helpful process, because in the end I was happier with the prospect of state control, though obviously ideally not in a bankrupt nation. If I can rely on the state to act with integrity and for the interests of citizens, I would be very happy to sacrifice my ability to cheat, and even happier to lose all the hassle and paperwork. Why would I want to cheat the state anymore than I would want to cheat my family or my neighbours? In the end, that is what cheating involves. The ones who do it most today tend to be wealthy, and they are the ones lobbying against ID cards and automation.

No, I for one am finally ready for Big Brother. Bring it on; its time has come. This sort of innovation can benefit everyone (except cheats), especially in poor countries. Yes, we need safeguards against abuse, and the single party state in China certainly has the potential to abuse its power. But in the end even they require the trust of their citizenry to operate. Beyond sensible safeguards, let us not fall for all this libertarian nonsense – it is often a smokescreen to defend selfish practices of those with privilege.   

City Limits

It has been the time to read the end of year editions of my periodicals. The double edition of The Economist is always the most enjoyable tread of the year. I am savouring it, reading a few articles each day and loving them all. The Guardian Weekly usually takes the heavy route, with lots of big picture summaries. Most are dull and predictable, and, this year especially, rather doom laden. Time has its person of the year gimmick, but also throws in some bigger picture opinion pieces, which if anything are even more dull than the Guardian’s, though I like that they tend to look forwards rather than backwards.

But this year one Time article caught my interest, sandwiched between all the pieces trying to second-guess the impact of the new president. It was by Michael Bloomberg, a man I admire greatly and whose positive legacy I observe on a daily basis in New York City. The essence of his article was that much of what happens at federal or even state level is ultimately trivial and irrelevant, and it is cities where the action happens. He uses the argument to strike a positive attitude about the future.

The article said little that was new, but it did strike a different tone from the mass of other material assailing me over the holidays, and so it made me think. Is the premise true? If so, is it a good thing? What might it portend for the future?

So is this really the age of the city? Well, more and more of us live in them. As agriculture declines as a major employer, most people choose to live in cities, both to find work and for social lives and services. In the developed world, many cities sprawled into suburbs as car ownership grew, but that trend has reversed in many places now and cities are becoming more compact again.

Where we live often determines how we live. Most important is housing, where a combination of growth rate, family size, geographical constraints and policy affect prices and rents, public and private, apartments and houses. Behind housing comes education, healthcare and transport, all areas where local policy can matter as much as national. The success of a city must be underpinned by jobs, lured by liveable cities and qualified people as well as financial incentives. A city must also provide working utilities and clean air and water for its citizens.

In the developing world the role of cities is even stronger, with massive regional variations. Chinese cities tend to specialise in manufacturing, Indian ones reflect cultural factors and in other countries, such as Indonesia, the capital could almost be regarded as its own country.

Where Bloomberg is most correct is that cities have tended to become incubators for innovation. Local needs are often urgent, and policymakers are in touch with their populace and can experiment and partner with providers. The most exciting examples of housing, education, transport or environment are found in cities, and good practice can spread. Look at Dubai and its hub policy, Rio and its carnival or the bay area and its technology start-ups. Bloomberg himself innovated in housing and in other areas such as nutrition. Many US cities are setting local minimum wages.

Further, while national politician can generalise and hand-wave at such things as pollution or integration of immigrants, cities have to find practical and immediate solutions. Look for Delhi and Beijing to find new ways to improve air quality and Malmo to lead the field in schooling diverse populations. It is cities which are finessing the rise of Uber, and which will set the trends once driverless cars change land use possibilities. Indeed, it is hard to imagine introducing driverless cars at any scale larger than a city, given the vast impacts on public transportation, layout and land use.

So in some ways it is indeed the age of the city. But Bloomberg almost makes the argument that national politics has become a sideshow, and this is just wishful thinking. Cities have partly stepped in to fill the void of an impotent congress, but there are large areas of policy where they have little relevance.

Cities can’t do much if the president chooses to goad China or Iran or Russia and sends the world hurtling towards the risk of damaging wars. Cities can’t do much if congress chooses to gut environmental regulations and take serious risks with climate. And cities can’t do much to compensate for other policy voids or missteps, whether on taxation, healthcare or immigration. They can mitigate some effects, but damage control still entails damage.

The same is true in the rest of the world. London can be open for business but it does not help much if the UK is closed. Jakarta can make social progress but only slowly if the rest of Indonesia is not ready. Chinese cities can create mini booms, but they will turn to busts if the national climate is sour.

Worse, even when cities are able to innovate, there are losers. One of the more striking charts I read over the holidays showed US inequality trends city by city. While inequality has grown everywhere, regions and cities have performed even worse than the general trend. Places with advantages, whether political, geographical or via resources such as colleges, have marched ahead while others have fallen behind. It is no wonder that politics has become even more polarised and that populism has found a foothold.

If we leave things to cities, the strong will on balance get stronger and the weak weaker. There are a few reasons for this. First, local politics can still be opaque and corrupt, and the most vulnerable places for this are those with chronic weaknesses and less competition. Chicago has been run by the mob and other vested interests for much of the last hundred years. Next, growth begets growth and debt begets debt. Debt comes from decline in population and tax revenues – poor old Detroit has to put all its efforts into paying its pensioners, and has little scope for investment. In the US, things are made worse because education budgets follow wealth, so cycles of depravity are reinforced. Lastly, people are less mobile than economists assume. People who are mobile gravitate to successful places, but unattractive cities cannot just close down like a bankrupt company.

By the way, it is not just Detroit and Chicago that will hit trouble in the coming years, as the finances of most cities are blighted by underfunded pensions, encouraged by financiers and kicked down the road by politicians. Historical errors can boomerang at any time. The Dallas police retiree fund will soon implode and may bring the finances of the whole city down with it.  

A Shell CEO once taught me a lesson about organisation. He warned against trying to find the perfect structure, instead saying that the role of senior leaders was to focus on areas where an existing structure fails. So if you organise by region, then promote cross-functional collaboration, and vice versa. You could argue that one role of national governments is to focus on where cities and regions will fail.

So, while innovative cities can be great for experimentation and creativity, I don’t subscribe to the view that the age of the city is a universal good. Bloomberg glosses over the things cities cannot fix and tendencies made worse by city-led governance. Thank you Michael for cheering me up on one dark morning this winter. Perhaps your intent was to cheer yourself up too. It was a good try, but ultimately rather a flawed argument.