Time management, once hailed as a solution to our productivity woes, is now under scrutiny. Could it be that our obsession with efficiency is actually causing more harm than good? Let's delve into the paradox of time management.
The eternal human struggle to live meaningfully in the face of inevitable death
The quest for increased personal productivity – for making the best possible use of your limited time – is a dominant motif of our age
- And today, the personal productivity movement that Mann helped launch promises to ease the pain with time-management advice tailored to the era of smartphones and the internet
- There are now thousands of apps in the “productivity” category of the Apple app store
- Software to simulate the ambient noise of working in a coffee shop
- Text editor that deletes words you have written if you don’t keep typing fast enough
You can seek to impose order on your inbox all you like
Eventually, you’ll need to confront the fact that the deluge of messages, and the urge you feel to get them all dealt with, aren’t really about technology. They’re manifestations of larger, more personal dilemmas.
- Which paths will you pursue, and which will you abandon?
- Which relationships will you prioritize, during your shockingly limited lifespan, and who will you resign yourself to disappointing? What matters?
Sometimes, techniques designed to enhance one’s personal productivity seem to exacerbate the very anxieties they were meant to allay
The better you get at managing time, the less of it you feel that you have
- Even when people did successfully implement Inbox Zero, it didn’t reliably bring calm
- Some interpreted it to mean that every email deserved a reply, which only shackled them more firmly to their inboxes
- Others grew jumpy at the thought of any messages cluttering an inbox that was supposed to stay pristine, and so ended up checking more frequently
- Finally, after two years, Mann announced that he was jettisoning the project
- But his career as a productivity guru had begun to stir an inner conflict
- “This topic of productivity induces the worst kind of procrastination, because it feels like you’re doing work, but I was producing stuff that had the express purpose of saying to people, ‘Look, come and see how to do your work, rather than doing your work!'”
- What if all this efficiency just makes things worse?
Thinking about time encourages clockwatching, which has been repeatedly shown in studies to undermine the quality of work
Good ideas do not emerge more rapidly when people feel under the gun
- Any increase in efficiency necessitates a trade-off: you get rid of unused expanses of time, but you also get the benefits of that extra time
- If there is an exclusive focus on using staff’s time as efficiently as possible, the result will be a department too busy to accommodate unpredictable arrivals
- A similar problem afflicts any corporate cost-cutting exercise that focuses on maximizing employees’ efficiency
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion
The more efficient you get at ploughing through tasks, the faster new tasks seem to arrive
- Self-consciousness
- Keep a detailed log of your time use, but doing so just heightens your awareness of the minutes ticking by, then lost for ever
- Focus on long-term goals, but the more you do that, the more despondent you become
- If you manage to achieve one, the satisfaction is brief – then it’s time to reset goals
The modern zeal for personal productivity, rooted in Taylor’s philosophy of efficiency, takes things several significant steps further
If only we could find the right techniques and apply enough self-discipline, it suggests, we could know that we were fitting everything important in, and could feel happy at last.
- Personal productivity presents itself as an antidote to busyness when it might better be understood as yet another form of busyness
- It serves the same psychological role that busyness has always served: to keep us sufficiently distracted that we don’t have to ask ourselves potentially terrifying questions about how we are spending our days
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Historical parallel
The spread of “labour-saving” devices transformed the lives of housewives and domestic servants across Europe and North America from the end of the 19th century
For much of the 20th century, as housework efficiency increased, so did the standards of cleanliness and domestic order that society came to expect.
In his 1962 book The Decline of Pleasure, the critic Walter Kerr noticed this shift in our experience of time: “We are all of us compelled to read for profit, party for contracts, lunch for contacts, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house.”
- Even rest and recreation, in a culture preoccupied with efficiency, can only be understood as valuable insofar as they are useful for some other purpose – usually, recuperation, so as to enable more work.
