'But I don't have time for this' - Truths and myths about time management

"This all sounds great, but I don't have time for this right now". I have heard this response so many times. I've heard it from friends who want to join a gym, from people who want to start a new business, from entrepreneurs who want to grow their existing business.

When I approached the topic of time management, I’ve had a pretty clear idea in my head about what I wanted to write about. I was going to write about the idea of time management that was formed by hundreds of articles in professional and lifestyle magazines and regurgitated by hundreds of business coaches and advisors throughout my career.

The more I looked into it, the more apparent it was – the vast majority of articles on time management have absolutely no factual backing behind them.

The techniques might have been useful to their authors or their close friends, but haven’t actually been researched. So I decided to follow my own advice and not include anything that is not backed by research or scalable facts.

My first point of call was the Australian National University – as an alumnus, I get access to their libraries and scholarly e-resources. My second stop was Google scholar. Turns out, there hasn’t been much research done on the topic of time management, even though the concept was first mentioned in 1954. And only a handful of published articles and PhDs actually looked at the effect that time management has on the job performance or work-life balance.

I wanted to find publications that had statistical backing behind their conclusions and that look at the mechanisms behind the relationship between time management and job performance.

I also didn’t want to focus on time management in education as I feel that work and business environment is significantly different as it imposes different pressures and consequences to decision making.

Well, my research returned 9 publications since the 1990 – 3 PhDs, 2 articles in psychology magazines and 4 shorter articles by notable scholars. Not a whole lot in 26 years.

In 2016 Google returns 75 million hits when searching for “time management”. Ten years ago it was it was 1.3 million. The amount of materials telling us how to do “time management” has increased by 73.7 million, but the amount of research into it has barely moved

One of the most cited articles on this topic is dated 1994 – 22 years ago!

So what do the scholarly articles say about the effect that time management has on the job performance? Most scholars agree that engaging in time management techniques results in increased perceived time control. There is also a significant increase in self-efficacy at work. What that means is that if you engage in time management, you’re more likely to feel good about your task and feel less stressed. As far as job performance goes, a lot of the common techniques showed no measurable results.

I don't want to turn this article into a negative rambling along the lines of "it's all lies on the internet". I want to talk about what actually works according to scholarly research, so here it is.

1. Scheduling is the best performing time management technique.

Scheduling, including breaking a big task into smaller ones with a specific deadline for each small part has been proven to have the biggest positive effect on job performance. Actually, that's the only technique that researchers seem to consistently find working on a statistically significant scale.

Break big tasks into smaller ones.
Set individual deadlines to each task.
Monitor the deadlines and have a weekly summary of how many deadlines you achieved and how many you missed.

2. Leave multitasking to computers, we are not designed for it.

Multitasking has been proven to reduce job performance. No matter how good you might feel doing two (or more) things at once, the science is pretty straight on that one – your brain doesn’t like switching between tasks and wastes a lot of energy and focus when you're trying to multitask.

And the result? Chances are both tasks will not be done as well as if you would do them one by one. We often don’t even realise that we’re multitasking. So what can you do in practice?

Do not check the emails as they arrive. If you can, switch off your desktop email notifications and check email hourly at most. Emails are not instant messages or calls – people shouldn’t expect an immediate answer to them.
Leave you smartphone in your desk drawer. And don’t look at it more often than once an hour or, even better, two hours. If people need you urgently – they will find you.

3. Most of the time you don’t have is in your procrastination efforts.

And doing work that you’re not supposed to be doing is procrastination too.

Research shows that most people do not complete all the planned tasks for the day, replacing them with what they perceive to be urgent tasks or more attractive tasks.

Remember that time you’ve had a month worth of banking to reconcile and you chose to look at training courses instead? That’s procrastination. Here are a few tips that might help you:

Your social networks stay with your phone. On the same schedule – no more than once an hour, preferable less often. If you have a dedicated work mobile – do not install Facebook, twitter or anything else that is not required for achieving your business or work goals.
Keep a time log diary for a week and record your whole day in 5-6 minute intervals for a week. Quite often putting a visual to your procrastination will help to stay more accountable with your time.
If you like planning tasks for the day – make sure you finish planned tasks first.

And remember, time management is not something that will change your whole business overnight. The result of your time management strategy is dependent on how well you follow these three simple concepts:

1. Schedule and break big tasks into smaller ones.

2. Stay accountable to your own deadlines and plans

3. Minimise opportunities for procrastination.

And learning to follow these concepts is about establishing habits. Most researchers agree that to establish a new habit or get rid of the old one, a person normally needs about 3-4 weeks. In my experience, most people give up after a week and comfort themselves with the notion that “this is the way I am”.

It may well be, but it’s only yourself that can stop you from getting better!