Conquering Time Management

I've been absolutely hammered this week with messages about how top performers and executives manage their time, think about time, focus on getting more out of time, on and on and on. Whenever a convergence like this happens, I sit up and take notice. The universe is telling me something.

These messages came at a point where I was really working hard at "putting things back in the box" - that phase where I try to restore order to the chaos that takes over after a big deadline at work, a house renovation, or a long stretch of out-of-town weekends. It was going pretty well; I felt as though I was making progress with living the very same integrated approach that seemed to unglue me just a few weeks ago. I must have been receptive to these cosmic messages at this moment where I was feeling empowered, in control, and back on my game. Here is what I heard:

The conditions of our work impact our perception of our time-worth.

Harvard Business Review ran a post by Laura Vanderkam, whose book I know How She Does It comes out this week. She talks about how people who accept reduced pay in exchange for a reduced workweek are typically working full-time in an 80% setting - no big surprise. But with that reduction and pay and not-so-much-a-reduction in hours, also comes a reduction in thinking they can "pass" during working hours. They are less comfortable with taking breaks, running errands over lunch, or many other life-hacks that full-time workers who have built flexibility into their day enjoy. The lesson? Vanderkam says it perfectly: "Women—and men—who are tempted to shift to a part-time schedule should first consider whether they could work a full-time schedule more flexibly. That seems to be the real ideal."

Delegation is totally worth it.

I have said some version of the following at least 100 times in my life: "It will be faster for me to just do it myself." I was listening to The Portfolio Life podcast this week, this week featuring Rory Vaden, author of Procrastinate on Purpose. One premise of the book is how ultra-performers give themselves permission to procrastinate on things that lack "significance" - a metric that helps them know not just when (urgency) or how (importance) something should be done, but also "why" - if they do that task today, will it create more time for them tomorrow?

Suddenly, the idea of taking the time to properly delegate a task to someone - training them, coaching them, helping them to master it - hits the third metric of significance in a big way. The example they discussed was this: if you have a task that takes you 5 minutes to do each day, you can "invest" up to 30 times that daily task time to train someone else to do it. (30 times!) Based on a simple return calculation - if you do that task each working day, you are spending about 1250 minutes each year on it. If you spend 2.5 hours training someone to do it, you'll have earned back that investment in one month, netting nearly 20 hours back into the rest of your year.

I started taking stock and found a number of tasks that, while they needed to be done, they didn't need to be done by me, and I didn't need anywhere near 30X to train someone else to do it. Delegation suddenly becomes a whole lot more attractive with this calculation.

We're better at time management than we think we are.

I'm really excited to read Laura Vanderkam's book this week because from what I've read already, it's not a collection of life-hacks to learn and apply to your life. Her study suggests that we (and by "we" she largely means women, but I think many men on the work-life integration path will see value here too) are doing better at carving out time for work, family, and self better than we think we are. We've conditioned ourselves to show others how busy, stressed, or out of control our lives are as a measure of our success and status. Instead, there is success and status in being able to say that not only did you hit the big deadline at work, but you did it while getting 7 hours of sleep every night, getting the kids on the bus every morning, and getting a run in 3 times a week.