Evidently, I last tagged a post “Time Management” back in 2017. I’m not sure how this reflects on my overall time management skills, but it’s certainly a choice.
Choice is all about Michelle Drouin’s brief article about choice in how we manage our time, and also some of the psychology around it.
If this seems too squishy for you, you can always check out Stephanie Vozza’s article on cutting doown your email inbox which, statistically, is piling up for most of you.
Writer, and fellow GTD fan, Terri Huck passed along this thoughtful piece by Oliver Burkeman about the modern obsession with “time management.”
It’s a great read, as it goes back into some of the origins of what is now something of a cottage industry on making us ever-more productive.
The article delves into the origins of time management — which goes back way more centuries than you might, at first, imagine, and moves forward to today. It also reflects on today’s workplace and the fetishizing of productivity and efficiency — a fetish often honored at the expense of happiness, job satisfaction, or just basic quality of life.
Given the posts I do about project management, especially the latest ones all about extracting maximum efficiency from meetings, this might seem strange.
It’s true. As a stage manager and a trainer of stage managers, I knew the benefits of the “Gemba walk” before I ever heard the term. As a project manager and a producer, my bullshit threshold has ever lowered because I have to get things done. And being involved with technology means I’ve strived to bring automation and greater efficiency to no end of workplaces for the better part of two decades.
But despite that –or perhaps because of it– I don’t believe efficiency is the fundamental to maximize. I think quality is.
And sometimes, to maximize quality, you have to build in some inefficiency.
That’s all the more important as these lean concepts come from the manufacturing sector to the office. Office workers are sometimes called “knowledge workers” and the path from data to information to knowledge to wisdom isn’t like repeatedly producing a widget. More often, it’s crafting a process that allows time for the right reflection and analysis, with some controls to ensure certain questions always get asked and answered.
I’d like to think that even the gurus who pioneered this revolution in manufacturing thought this way, though perhaps they’d find all my sentences terribly inefficient.
In any case, I was reading up on Taiichi Ohno, the “father” of the Toyota Production System, “Lean manufacturing” guru, and developer of Kanban (I love Kanban Boards, by the way). Because doing all that wasn’t enough, he also attempted to distill much of his philosophy into “Ten Precepts.”
Some of it is as manic go-getter as you might expect, such as “Re-improve what was improved for further improvement.” I mean, I’m not saying that’s wrong, but I am saying it feels like I just downed two shots of espresso just by reading that sentence.
However, one of his precepts really struck me as acknowledging the purpose of efficiency and inefficiency:
Valueless motions are equal to shortening one’s life.
That’s why you want to take out the slog. You want to eliminate the mundane.
When I’m writing, I want to spend time telling a story not figuring out how to use the pen.
But I’m still going to spend hours writing and re-writing. I’m going to obsess about certain story points, perhaps ones that others would wonder why I’m taking so much time. For me, that’s still time well spent.
Doing something faster doesn’t necessarily add value. Buying a store-bought cake is certainly more efficient than making one myself. It might even be a better quality cake than what I can manage. But that isn’t the whole picture of quality.
And that seems to factor into the article above and the notions of time management being foisted upon us. The current crop of time management mavens tend to default to one simplistic equation that emphasizes a one-dimensional, non-customizable version of efficiency.
No wonder so many of us don’t register some of the time we might save using their methodology. The time we save isn’t valuable (possibly not even recognizable as time saved).
Feel free to offer other perspectives or resources in the comments.
I’m going to post on project management topics in what I’ll call a new wonky Wednesday tradition.
Since we’re now deep into the New Year (well, for the Federal government anyway), I thought I’d delve into the bane of so many people’s existence: meetings.
To paraphrase a common sentiment about writing, I don’t like meetings, but I love having met. Why? Because within any enterprise, there’s decisions to be made and issues to be hashed out and discussed. Sure, you can do one-on-one conversations at someone’s desk or fortuitously bump into the right people in the hallway sometime during the workday. But seriously: a good meeting is a place where decisions can be made and next steps are defined. A good recurring meeting blocks out a time and place to assess the status of a project and make sure stuff gets dealt with.
If this rosy picture of meetings bears no resemblance to meetings you’re beset with, I understand. Believe me, I too have suffered hours and hours of tedium, labeled as “meetings.” I have endured time-sucking blather that the organizers purported would be useful. Moreover, the people who foist these life-draining events on us seem to exist in every organization in every corner of the globe.
But you can fight back.
First and foremost: wherever you can, whenever you can, make sure any meeting you have to attend has an agenda.
Yeah, this is different from all the agendas people might come to meetings with like “make sure my group isn’t blamed for anything” or “how can I fill the hour with my talking and without getting assigned any tasks?” These people will descend upon meetings regardless of your best efforts.
Your agenda, should you choose to accept it, is to do whatever you can to make sure the meeting has an agenda: by which I mean at least a listing of topics or explanation about what you are to discuss.
Once you take the step of having this meeting agenda, you will have established a foothold from which to launch additional improvements to your meetings. For example, when you insist on an agenda, you can:
While you are fighting this good fight, you’re sure to get resistance. Even the best people are busy and sometimes honestly don’t have time to prepare for meetings because of many other meetings and fires that spring up. And planning isn’t as exciting as firefighting, so you’ll also get pushback from those who get a thrill out of fighting fires. I mean, coming in and saving the day is so, so much more exciting than status meetings. Getting that thrill is, well, thrilling.
I’ll talk more about dealing with the firefighters and thrill-seekers in more depth in a later post. For now, bear in mind that you can’t completely ignore people who give you pushback on regular meetings and regularly formatted meetings. To make and maintain your gains in creating meaningful meetings, you need to be mindful of “what’s in it for them?”
In short, a meeting needs to bring value to the whomever is attending over and above what sending an email, having a one-on-one conversation, or just reading meeting minutes would provide.
For this reason, you need to be open with the structure of your meeting. This whole post is about adding an agenda to a meeting, but there are plenty of meetings that won’t fit some of the traditional improvements I described above. Perhaps you have some of these short, stand-up meetings meant to be 5-15 minutes versus the more traditional 30-60 minute meetings that inhabit offices.
In this case, your agenda is making sure this short meeting has the proper structure. That structure fulfills the same purpose as a traditional agenda: it helps define the flow of the meeting.
Having that structure is your first key in making the meeting valuable and gaining allies to keep the gains you’ve made.
But if you want to make sure you can make gains, a great first step is simply to ensure your meetings have an agenda.
Bonus Round – The Meeting Facilitator
Creating agendas for meetings is all well and good, but as with so many attempts to aid efficiency and sanity, the improvement depends on people.
So if you want to keep on course to have more meaningful meetings, you want to make sure someone is wearing the hat of meeting facilitator. This need not be the team lead or manager. In fact, some meetings benefit from that leader not being the timekeeper. They get to think strategically while the meeting facilitator is tactical. By tactical I mean things like:
Just like a meeting structure should be organic and open to improvement, what, where, and how forceful a meeting facilitator may change over time.
But one of the key things a facilitator can maintain is that your meetings have an agenda.