Based On What Youã¢â‚¬â„¢ve Learned About Time Management, Which Of These Statements Is True?

Productivity Isn't About Fourth dimension Management. It'south About Attention Management.

"Time management" is not a solution — it's actually part of the problem.

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Erik Winkowski Credit Credit... Erik Winkowski

March 28, 2019

A few years ago during a break in a leadership class I was teaching, a director named Michael walked up looking unsettled. His boss had told him he needed to exist more than productive, so he had spent a few hours analyzing how he spent his time. He had already cut his nonessential meetings. He couldn't find any tasks to drib from his calendar. He didn't run into an obvious style to do them more efficiently.

"This is going to sound like a joke, merely information technology's not," he confessed. "My only thought is to drink less water so I don't take to go to the bathroom so many times."

We live in a culture obsessed with personal productivity. We devour books on getting things done and dream of four-hr workweeks. Nosotros worship at the altar of hustle and boast about beingness busy. The central to getting things washed, we're oft told, is time management. If you could just programme your schedule amend, you could reach productivity nirvana.

But later on two decades of studying productivity, I've become convinced that time management is not a solution — it's really part of the problem.

For well-nigh of my career, the about frequent question I've gotten is: "How exercise I get more washed?" Sometimes people ask because they know I'm an organizational psychologist, and productivity is one of my areas of expertise. More oftentimes they're asking considering they've read in a New York Times article or a popular book that I go a lot done.

But the truth is that I don't feel very productive. I'k constantly falling short of my daily goals for progress, so I've struggled to reply the question. It wasn't until that chat with Michael that it dawned on me: Being prolific is not about fourth dimension management. There are a limited number of hours in the twenty-four hour period, and focusing on time management only makes united states of america more aware of how many of those hours nosotros waste material.

A better option is attending direction: Prioritize the people and projects that matter, and it won't matter how long anything takes.

Attending management is the art of focusing on getting things washed for the right reasons, in the right places and at the correct moments.

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O.K., sure, but why shift our focus?

Co-ordinate to conventional wisdom well-nigh time management, y'all're supposed to set up goals for when you desire to end a task. I decided to endeavour it for this article. The target was ane,200 words, so I sat down at 8 a.m. and gave myself three hours, which would allow me to write at the leisurely pace of six words per minute. I then spent the adjacent 6 minutes writing a grand total of zero words, staring at a flashing cursor. The merely task I completed was a Google search of whether the cursor was named in honour of all the writers who accept cursed it. (Yes, I know you're mocking me, y'all poor blinking alibi for a rectangle.) And so I wondered how many words I actually blazon per infinitesimal and took a typing examination. I wasn't happy with my score, so I took another … and some other.

Eventually I got frustrated and shifted to attending management. E.B. White once wrote: "I ascend in the morn torn between a want to meliorate (or save) the world and a desire to bask (or savor) the world. This makes information technology hard to program the day." But in my research, I've institute that productive people don't agonize about which desire to pursue. They go after both simultaneously, gravitating toward projects that are personally interesting and socially meaningful.

So instead of focusing on how quickly I wanted to finish this article, I asked why I agreed to write it in the first place: I might acquire something new when synthesizing the research; I'd finally have somewhere to betoken people when they inquire about productivity; and information technology might help some of those people. That led me to outset thinking about specific people who might read this, which reminded me of Michael. Boom.

Oft our productivity struggles are caused non past a lack of efficiency, but a lack of motivation. Productivity isn't a virtue. It's a means to an end. Information technology'due south only virtuous if the end is worthy. If productivity is your goal, y'all have to rely on willpower to push button yourself to go a job washed. If y'all pay attention to why you're excited about the projection and who will benefit from it, you lot'll be naturally pulled into it by intrinsic motivation.

But how do I stay on task if I'm non worried almost time?

Attention management likewise involves noticing where you get things done. I grew up in Michigan, and when I went back at that place for grad schoolhouse, I tried to convince a friend from the West Coast to join me.

"It's besides cold and gray," she said after a visit during a snowstorm. She and so went off to Stanford. That next Michigan winter was the coldest, grayest flavour I could remember, and I have never been more than productive. At that place was nothing to do only work!

Sure enough, a serial of studies led past Julia Lee (now at Michigan) show that bad weather condition is adept for productivity because we're less likely to be distracted by the thought of going outside. Researchers establish that on days when it rained, Japanese bank employees finished transactions faster, and on days when the weather was bad in America, people were more efficient in correcting spelling errors in an essay. With that in listen, I deliberately waited to beginning writing this article until the twenty-four hour period after a snowstorm, when the melting slush outside my window was not appealing.

My favorite role of attending direction is the when. Most of our productivity challenges are with tasks that we don't want to do but that we need to do. For years, I thought the way to handle those tasks was to practise them correct later the most interesting tasks so the energy would spill over. And so my colleague Jihae Shin and I ran a study in a Korean department store and found that when employees had a highly interesting task, they actually performed worse on their most irksome tasks.

One possible reason is what's called attention residue: Your mind keeps wandering back to the interesting task, disrupting your focus on the boring chore. But in an experiment with Americans watching videos so doing a dull information entry task, nosotros found support for a different mechanism: dissimilarity effects. A fascinating or funny video makes the data entry task seem fifty-fifty more than excruciating, the same fashion a sweet dessert makes a sour vegetable sense of taste yuckier. So if you're trying to power through a boring task, do it later on a moderately interesting i, and salve your most exciting job as a reward for afterward. It's not nearly fourth dimension; it's about timing.

Of makers and managers

I'm guessing your goal is not just to be more productive — you lot probably want to be creative, too.

The stumbling cake is that productivity and creativity demand reverse attention management strategies. Productivity is fueled by raising attentional filters to keep unrelated or distracting thoughts out. But creativity is fueled by lowering attentional filters to permit those thoughts in.

How do you get the best of both worlds? In his book "When," Dan Pinkish writes about evidence that your circadian rhythm can help you figure out the right fourth dimension to exercise your productive and creative work. If you're a morning time person, you should practise your belittling work early when yous're at superlative alertness; your routine tasks around lunchtime in your trough; and your creative work in the late afternoon or evening when you lot're more likely to practice nonlinear thinking. If you're more of a nighttime owl, you might exist meliorate off flipping creative projects to your fuzzy mornings and analytical tasks to your clearest-eyed late afternoon and evening moments. Information technology's not time direction, because you might spend the same amount of fourth dimension on the tasks even later on you rearrange your schedule. It'south attention management: You're noticing the guild of tasks that works for yous and adjusting accordingly.

Paying attention to timing direction also means thinking differently about how you plan your piece of work. I love Paul Graham'due south suggestion to split up the week into "maker days" and "managing director days."

On manager days, you hold your meetings and calls. On maker days, you block out fourth dimension to be productive and creative, knowing you lot'll be complimentary from distractions that would unremarkably interrupt your menstruum. Unfortunately, few of u.s. accept the luxury to manage every calendar week that way, which means we need to detect ways to carve out maker moments.

Time management says we should eliminate distractions birthday — not just interruptions from other people, simply also the times when nosotros interrupt ourselves. If y'all're getting sucked into social media, you'd need to terminate cold turkey. Attention management offers an culling: Be thoughtful well-nigh the timing of those distractions.

When I was in middle schoolhouse, I lost a whole Sabbatum to watching Tv set and I felt pretty disgusted with myself afterward. But I didn't give up Tv. I made a rule: I would only turn on the Idiot box if I already knew what I wanted to watch. I've adopted the same policy on social media: In times when I could be working, I only log in to share content. I relieve scrolling for windows when I couldn't be getting anything done, similar waiting for a flight to take off or cooling downwards after exercise.

Most of the writers I know look for maker days to outset writing, believing they demand at least four or vi hours to dig into a big idea or a circuitous problem. Merely there's evidence that binge writers really go less done than people who write in shorter bursts. You lot can make meaningful progress in surprisingly small intervals: When graduate students were trained to write in 15-minute intervals, they finished their dissertations faster.

If y'all're trying to be more productive, don't analyze how you lot spend your time. Pay attention to what consumes your attention. I've but looked at the clock for the showtime time since I thought of the story about Michael. It'south 10:36 a.g., and I've gone almost 500 words over my target. I'll get out it to y'all to decide whether the past 156 minutes were a good utilise of my attending — and whether the past few minutes of reading this were a adept utilize of yours.

Which brings me to 1 more thought: I'm pretty sure there'southward an eighth addiction of highly constructive people. They don't spend all their fourth dimension reading about the 7 habits of highly effective people.

Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, is the author of "Originals." For more on building your career and connections, mind to WorkLife with Adam Grant, a TED original podcast on the science of making work non suck. Y'all can discover WorkLife on Apple Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform.