Misplacing your management skills

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As a speaker I recently delivered a 10 minute coaching slot at the beginning of a network meeting. I selected a topic apparently much loved by those aspiring to coach – Time Management. When I entered the phrase into Google I got:

* 64.4 million listings for time management skills;
* 258 million listings for time management tools; and
* 140 million listings for time management training sessions.

Clearly, I was on the right track.

Regretfully, those so intent on learning about time management are doomed to a degree of disappointment. While purveyors of advice on time management may be as tightly packed as snake oil sellers at a health-food convention there are some inherent attributes of time that ought to be pointed out first.

1) Time just happens. If I kick off a stopwatch and then ask someone to ‘manage’ the time as I talk I am not quite sure how they would do that. Note that I am asking that they manage the time and only the time, not my talk. With so many courses and techniques I am sure there must be a way to make time stop, start, increase, diminish, reverse, multiple and turn left at the traffic lights; I just haven’t come across it yet.

2) The predictability of time - 24 hours in a day; 7 days in a week; 52 weeks in a year – should probably make managing it easier. But that predictability is an illusion. There’s really 24hrs and 59 seconds in a day – hence the Leap Year. In 1751 there was no January, February or March in England and Wales. Under Napoleon there were 10 days in a week (a decade) and each month had 3 decades. The year ended (on the old Sept 17th) with 5 supplementary days to bring it back to 365 days in a year, or 6 supplementary days in a Leap Year.

3) Besides messing about with the calendar it is possible genuinely to bend the space/time continuum under an intense gravitational field; time will run at different speeds and in different directions.

4) The theory of relativity tells us that the faster you travel through space, the slower you travel through time. If one of a pair of twins rockets off through space for a period of time, he would return younger than his sibling.

Probably time is a much more slippery subject than it at first appears.

One of the things that may prompt us to attempt to ‘manage’ time is that we view it as scarce, but there is actually loads of it. About 14 billion years have elapsed since the “Big Bang” and – as far as we can tell – time stretches for an infinite distance into the future. Whatever else may be scarce, it isn’t time.

And time is a bit like air - we have all the time that there is. We all have 24 hours and 59 seconds in a day. Nobody goes short, or is in any way deprived. There is no more to be had.

Perhaps the most helpful change we can make is to stop thinking of time as a resource, like water, minerals or money. Time is not a resource, it’s a dimension like height, width and depth and like those other dimensions its gradations are just human inventions.

Time is not susceptible to management.

That leaves us with the one component in any situation that we are best placed to manage – ourselves.

Unless we are managing our own thoughts and feelings (and nobody else can) any organizational method that is superimposed will be fatally undermined. On the myriad of courses listed by Google you can learn about diaries, schedules, systems, tidying, delegating and dumping, but without first being in control of ourselves (to some degree) all the clever plans and procedures will be like dandelions parachutes in a windstorm.

There are two very simple (not easy) elements to managing ourselves:

* Clarity – knowing exactly what outcome we want.

* Desire – an overwhelming connection with that outcome.

With those two successfully addressed we can make the most of ourselves – whatever amount of time we think we may have.