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.