Ironically this is based on my September 2023 newsletter and I have only just added it to my website…
Time management used to be something only over-ambitious executives and wannabe-executives worried about. Now, I think almost everyone is at least a little bit interested in it, even if they don’t call it by its name. It’s related to FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. There always seems to be more to do than we have time to do it in, and what’s more, social media is full of people who appear to be cramming more into one day than we can manage in a month. I find myself taunted by the people who manage to turn out their weekly (weekly!) Substacks, blogs or podcasts, alongside their books, columns, radio documentaries, hand-made furniture, babies…
Surrounded by all these highly-visible and signalling high-achievers, it’s hard to not to feel that we are all failing with our personal time management. So we’re drawn to anything that promises to enable us to do more, whether it’s tips for managing our screen time, cooking hacks, listening to podcast at 1.5x speed, ways to learn a language or a skill in double-quick time, etc etc. Anything to make us more efficient.
And what is the objective of this increased efficiency? Cramming more in. This isn’t inevitable. Efficiency is all about getting more done with less time and effort, and so it could be used to free up time. But in the FOMO world, the purpose is not to create free time but to free time up in order for it to be filled with other tasks. It’s not about getting things done more efficiently but efficiently getting more things done.
I have often felt that I have not been as productive as I should be. When I started my PhD, I recalled with embarrassment how few hours a day I put into my studies as an undergraduate (and I was one of the more diligent ones). I resolved to approach my graduate work as if it were a job and put in solid eight-hour days. I prepared charts on graph paper to keep myself to the promise. After the first few weeks I was falling horribly short. The logs were soon abandoned, but the sense of not doing enough in a day has not gone away. In my working life now, I remain aware of how some mornings or afternoons can pass without anything of substance apparently being achieved.
And yet, if I look at what I have managed to do in my working life, I don’t seem to have been unproductive. I sometimes catch a glimpse of my own books on the shelf and can’t quite believe that I wrote them all, let alone understand how I did it. At times like these, I see better what is wrong with the time management paradigm.
In short, time management sees the goal of productivity to be: make as many minutes of the day productive as possible. That seems to be almost tautological: the more productive hours per day, the more you produce. The problem is that the measure of productivity in many human activities should be more qualitative than quantitive. A gag writer for a TV show is worth more if they come up with ten jokes a day, three of which are brilliant, than if they come up with a hundred duds. Some writers I won’t name would have done better to write three very different books over a decade than churn out what are in effect different iterations of the same basic tome again and again (and again).
I believe that time management originated in the business world and was a kind of extension of the time and motion studies used to boost output in factories. In that original context it makes perfect sense. The more productive each minute is, the more output per input and the greater profit. But in much of what we do, it doesn’t matter how productive individual minutes are, as long as the end result is the one we want. In other words, if you manage to achieve what you set out to achieve (accepting it is inevitably less than what you’d ideally hope to achieve), it doesn’t matter how many hours a week are “unproductive”.
Empirical evidence of this is provided in Mason Currey’s wonderful book, Daily Rituals, which catalogues the quotidian routines of artists, philosophers, scientists and writers. Although every one of his subject has their idiosyncrasies, it is striking how many of them only spent around three-to-five hours per day on their actual work and had walks, lunches and other leisure activities built into their schedules. This cannot be coincidental. In order for the mind to work at its best, its different conscious parts all need their downtime. Rational deliberation is helped by being rested while we do something like listening to music. A composer will take longer to find the ideal chord progressions they never think about anything else.
I’m sure this general truth applies to activities not typically thought of as creative. People are scornful of how much time in offices is “wasted” but without those daydreams, water cooler gossips, web surfs and the like, I bet most managers would go crazy.
There’s also something a bit disturbing about the way in which time management has entered non-working life. Leisure time also has to be maximised, with optimised intensive workouts, shortcuts in the kitchen, the fastest rather than the most pleasant route on the satnav and so on. The idea that we should “live in the moment” has insidiously mutated from a call to slow down and relax into an imperative to make sure that every damn minute counts, because otherwise you’re die with long, unchecked bucket list.
Of course, many jobs involve physical tasks which can be measured and do fall under the classic time management paradigm. A bar person who spends half their time dawdling and not serving drinks is not as good as one who serves quickly and well throughout the shift. But I would suggest that whenever we are not doing something which has a clear and measurable material output, efficiency should be judged on the quality of the eventual outcome, not on what proportion of time we directly devote to the task.
There is also something else that real productivity requires: focus. There are always more things than we could do than we have time to do well. People who achieve their potential do not spread themselves too thinly. One danger of ubiquitous time management evangelism is that it encourages us to think that we really could do everything, if only we got ourselves organised enough. Ironically, buying into the false promise that efficiency will enable us to make our productive time more thickly-packed actually tends to make it thinner. The secret of time management you don’t often hear is that to do your best, you often have to do less.
(By the way, the subtitle of Currey’s book was originally “How artists work”. I see that now it is “How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration, and Get to Work”. It’s ironic that the publishers have made it sound more like a typical book on time management when the key message, I think, is that we should worry less about it.)