Input Fixation And Time Management

In businesses today, a plethora of processes, initiatives and programmes are in play at any one time. Whatever their nature, these processes usually have different ‘owners’ and are led by different functions. The problem is that there is rarely somebody overseeing all these different processes or looking at their combined impact on employees. No one has the task of assessing the time required to execute the different stages of any process. Consequently, employees frequently find themselves being pulled in multiple directions and put under pressure to satisfy competing demands on their time. In addition to these major business processes, many respondents in my work time survey4 commented on the substantial time they devoted each week to routine tasks and essential compliance activities. ‘Having to do repetitive admin tasks that could be delegated’ was a common refrain in survey participants’ comments. Doing our best work requires an environment – physical and virtual – that helps us concentrate on the task at hand and that minimizes distractions tugging at our attention. While often plush, corporate offices are not always designed to help their occupants to concentrate. A classic example is complaining. Studies5 have found that most employees spend 10 or more hours per month complaining – or listening to others complain – about their bosses or senior management. Astonishingly, almost a third spend 20 hours or more doing so.

Higher Ground

By not raising the issue directly with the party concerned, we are whittling away productive time and fostering discontent. Yet they are still bombarded by messages popping up on their screen while on calls or concentrating on their work. One senior professional described it as ‘the bane of my life’, likening it to ‘one of your children popping in saying, Mummy, can you do this? Add a real child or children at home into the mix, and the chances of uninterrupted work nosedives further, especially for women. Remember when we used to leave our work behind when we left the office and could enjoy a proper break during the evenings, weekends and holidays? Traditional boundaries between work and home lives are fast dissolving. The technology that has enabled us to ‘work from anywhere’ has led us to ‘work from everywhere’. We’re not switching off anymore. A 2014 survey7 found that 60% of those who used smartphones were connected to work for 13.5 hours or more a day. Four in 10 managers in Britain put in more than 60 hours a week. This culture of overworking is pointless. After a certain point, productivity actually goes down when the number of hours worked per week goes up. Above 45 hours, productivity drops off a cliff, particularly for knowledge workers.

Just So That You Know

In one study, 52% agreed that boundaries between their work and home lives were increasingly blurred, up from 40% in just six months. One consulting partner confided, ‘My hours have gone up. I used to work about 50 hours a week. Now I work more, between 55 and 65 on a regular basis. A defining characteristic of many professionals’ work lives is their lack of control over the demands on their time and corresponding lack of time freedom – something identified as a key need for the brain. A study of almost 3000 managers by the Norwegian Business School11 found that 61.8% ‘experienced time pressure often or all the time’. Fewer than 5% said they rarely or never had time pressure at work. Time pressure is due in part to workload and job design, but it’s also due to other people’s demands on you. Middle and junior managers are rarely able to push back on senior people’s demands on their time. You’re constantly stretched. You might spend a whole day in meetings because other people think that their time and what they’re doing is more important.

Put One Foot In Front Of The Other

But when you walk away you realize you haven’t achieved any of your objectives for that day. In my own time survey,12 59% of respondents reported ‘limited’ or ‘partial’ time freedom compared with 40% who enjoyed ‘significant’ or ‘unlimited’ time freedom. And we know that time control matters. We are too hung up on time as an input – how much time we spend doing X or Y activities. Many of the constructs we use in our businesses use time as the underlying metric because it is convenient. Instead, we should be more focused on the end result, asking ourselves ‘What have we actually achieved? What value or impact have we created for our clients, our colleagues, our business and the wider community?’ Take client billing, for example. We’re stuck in a mental model which says we’re selling our time. We charge for the days we show up, or the hours and minutes spent on client work, not for the results our work helps to bring about in our clients’ businesses. Consider parental leave. By focusing on time, policies assume everyone’s needs are identical and end up being exclusive – working for some but not all – rather than inclusive. So why don’t we simply switch our focus, looking at outputs instead of inputs? Because it is much harder to articulate, measure and evaluate outcomes. It is so much easier to stick with measuring time as a proxy. But it’s not impossible to change our mindset and practices. Part 2 describes how we can do this, and I’d argue that it is well worth making the difficult shift. Annual bonuses are often determined by the extent to which employees have missed, met or exceeded targets for hours billed and/or revenue generated. With career progression, we are not offering clear and varied options or illustrating the consequences of different choices. You can very easily fall into being a career analyst unless you make the right moves early on. But in your twenties, nobody tells you that 10 years later you are never going to run a portfolio because you’ve had too limited experience. It’s down to luck not judgment. These are typically linear, with progression based on time spent at each level and few alternative routes to the top, and rarely flexed to accommodate different life stages. For employees whose backgrounds and profiles mirror those of senior leaders, these career paths are obvious and achievable.