Why your attempts at time management fail (and what to do about it)
How many times have you tried time management techniques? At first, they seem satisfying and encouraging – who doesn’t love crossing things off a list? But for most people, while a few pointers might stick, the majority of time management plans get derailed.
Why? You might think it’s because you’re often interrupted, your boss makes planning impossible, the business you’re in doesn’t lend itself to managing time, or even that something is “wrong” with you. But those are rarely at the heart of time management failures.
I’ll address by dividing it into five parts. Click any of these to jump ahead.
2. Why attention management works
5. Wrapping up
1. Why time management fails
The problem with “time management” is that most of the time, it measures the wrong thing — like studiously monitoring miles per gallon instead of progress toward your destination. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be aware of time, but I am saying that in most business settings, systems that measure efficiency won’t help you as much as systems that manage your achievements and results.
Beyond that, time isn’t something over which any individual has final control. Yes, it’s an important instrument, but because it’s shared and used by billions of people simultaneously, it’s a tool of interdependence, like global currency or the English language. We’re not independently in control.
You might say, “Wait, I have control over the time within my own life,” and while that’s sometimes true, it’s very often a misconception. We assume we have control, but it’s fleeting, and we often hand over the controls to others because, for practical reasons, we need to do so. Your boss, your spouse, a long-winded colleague, and even external factors like weather and traffic — take more of your time than you might otherwise plan because of the interdependent nature of time in our relationships and our lives.
Unanticipated interruptions are the most obvious evidence of this time theft. For example, your baby decides to be born six weeks early, or your biggest client calls and wants to Zoom right now. Water starts to leak through your bedroom ceiling, or your flight is canceled. The school calls you to pick up your child, who seems to have the flu; or your significant other says, “We need to talk.”
You get the idea. A seemingly infinite number of things compete with the idea of time management, which itself is something we can’t control. That is why, despite our great hope that it will save us from the onslaught of demands on our time, it so often does not.
When time management fails you, which it inevitably will, remember that you can ALWAYS manage your attention, which will give you much better results.
The reason we are drawn to time management is its promise of helping us all squeeze a jumbo list of tasks into our ever-shrinking days, weeks, and months. We enjoy the satisfaction of crossing the maximum number of items off our lists, and long for the opportunity to congratulate ourselves on how much we have accomplished.
However, this approach to managing our days completely fractures one’s attention, gives too much weight to relatively insignificant things, and ultimately damages our brain’s ability to concentrate. Worse, it posits that time is our most valuable resource, which is almost always an incorrect assumption.
Want an example? Choose any former US president. Whether you loved or hated him, you can probably agree that how he managed his time had far less impact on the nation than how he chose to manage his attention. His presidency was defined by wherever he concentrated his focus — not whether he did a hundred different things on a given Wednesday.
2. Why attention management works
If managing time isn’t the right concept, then what is?
I say it’s managing your attention — because your attention is the most valuable resource you have. What you do with your attention is far more significant than how you manage the logistics of your day, because managing attention focuses you on working toward an important outcome, not fiddling with the subordinate mechanics.
As an illustration, I’ll point to a personal story about my uncle Andy, a fantastic individual who is, sadly, no longer with us. Andy prioritized his relationships with family and friends. Even when I was a child, he always made me feel important by not letting anything interrupt our talks. He poured his whole self into listening, asking questions, and being completely present. I never had to doubt whether I was important to Andy. My whole life, I loved being around him.
Later, I came to understand that giving undivided attention to people he valued was a conscious choice on Andy’s part, one that he worked at and didn’t reserve just for me. Everyone who knew him told similar stories about their rich time spent with Andy, who was (no surprise) widely loved. He used focused attention to make those relationships strong and sound because, for him, it mattered.
This wouldn’t have been the case if he had routinely approached any of us with, “What do you need? I’ve got until 11:45,” or “Just a sec, I’ve got to check a few emails first.”
Although this is a personal example, the same approach can work wonders in one’s professional life.
If you’re a leader and you can bring this same level of undivided attention to the members of your team, the loyalty, engagement, and productivity you seek from them will develop much faster and be more solid.
If you’re a technician or specialist, sequestering yourself in an attention zone once or twice a day will advance your project or innovation much faster than working through a long to-do list or responding to pings on your phone.
If you’re a manager, you’ll guide your people and resources better when you’re deeply engaged with them, which can only happen with richly applied attention. The challenge for you is not to give your attention to every prompt that comes your way, but control what you allow to have your attention, and what doesn’t automatically get it. Everything else goes into a bucket of things you’ll handle during the low-energy parts of your day.
The challenge for you is not to give your attention to every prompt that comes your way, but control what you allow to have your attention.
There are many examples of how focused attention makes an incredible difference in the outcome of one’s life and work. This couldn’t be clearer than in the retrospectives we’ve seen recently of Venus Williams and Roger Federer, two record-smashing tennis champs who retired after amazing careers that paired talent with well-developed concentration and focus skills.
That had me reflecting on Arthur Ashe, the legendary tennis champion for whom the US Open court is named — a facility that just celebrated its 25th anniversary. Ashe’s slight frame was supported by extreme preparation and well-developed mental toughness, a habit of focus that he mastered at an early age.
Young Arthur, in a time before the internet, studied the encyclopedia to learn as much as he could about London, France, and Australia because one day, he intended to play at Wimbledon, the French Open, and the Australian Open. Throughout his too-short life, he continued to exemplify that keen focus, leading to amazing accomplishments not only in tennis, but in health care, civil rights, and intellectual leadership.
3. The enemy of attention
Attention, focus, concentration — these are the healthiest forms of personal engagement in work. They’re not always the easiest to incorporate each day, but like getting enough protein and vegetables, they’re the most productive and sustaining components of life at work.
Nevertheless, the world is full of other approaches that are the workplace equivalent of trendy diets or fast food. And most of them hang their theories on a few shiny tips or bromides as their claim to being the right solution. This is no different than a fast-food chain claiming its hamburger has “25 grams of protein” or is “30% larger” to distract you from its high levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium – the triumvirate of bad nutrition.
For most people, fad systems are clearly unrealistic, even if the people who promote them are popular. These trends-of-the-moment promise things like a workload reduced to a few hours each week, or a way to outsource your responsibilities to people who could never realistically qualify for your job. Or they ask you to believe that doing X, Y, and Z will help you retire early as a millionaire, or live like one as you travel the world while working remotely.
They appealing ideas, but more likely to work as sitcom concepts than as practical advice for professionals.
You may be surprised if I say that time management systems often fall into this same category, promising you the superpower of being able to squeeze a jumbo list of tasks into ever-shrinking days, capped off with self-congratulation each evening. But often, they are 10% memorable quotes and 90% illusion, like the fantasy that your present-day body could fit into what you wore to your high school prom, or that by overscheduling every day, you’ll magically find time to get a master’s degree at night.
If you want to succeed at the job and career path you have, the industry in which you specialize, and/or the life you already occupy, then those programs are distractions that won’t help you. Their common shortcoming in the workplace is that they don’t focus your mind on what it finds most rewarding: deeply satisfying engagement in (and mastery of) productivity, achievements, and accomplishments that are important and meaningful to you.
You can reach this place only through managing your attention – who or what gets it, how much of it you spend, and how you protect and preserve it.
Of course, trendy new “systems” and time management routines aren’t the only obstacles to managing attention. Interruptions, a false or imagined sense of urgency, phone calls, notifications, noise, clutter, temperature, and a misplaced devotion to multitasking are all culprits. If you’d like a deeper look, please see my post on the enemies of time and attention.
4. Understanding attention
Many people approach their workday feeling that they can muster attention whenever they choose. One of the people on my staff says she’s “in recovery” from a life-long belief that “If I can just clear out all this stuff [emails, phone messages, requests from others, scheduling meetings or appointments] this morning, I can focus on my most important task this afternoon.”
This is a common misconception, even after many failed attempts to make it work. Let’s demystify that. Although a long list of morning tasks may be completed, and the afternoon is probably quieter, by 2 PM or so, our mental energy is just a shadow of what it had been earlier in the day. It’s almost impossible to get ourselves back in the zone to accomplish the big priority of the day.
Here’s why: attention is finite. It’s mental energy, and it doesn’t come in an endless supply. When you spend it on a four- or five-hour marathon of messages and quick tasks, your attention becomes fractured, and your mind gets tired. That’s why engaging in another big mental event, such as an important project that demands your best thinking, doesn’t work well late in the day.
So, by 3 PM, when you find yourself scrolling through Facebook posts instead of working on a detailed analysis of last month’s programs (due yesterday), it’s because your brain is seeking a comfortable place that doesn’t require too much of it.
While Facebook (or any similar distraction) may give your brain a pause, it doesn’t restore your full attention level. Only rest can do that, which is why sufficient sleep each night is critical to your success on the job.
As my “recovering” colleague learned, the answer lies in putting daily tasks in a different order.
Morning matters. First, recognize that for most people, the best energy comes in the morning and last for about two or three hours between 8 and noon. So, this is when you want to do deep work on your most important project, ideally every day to develop that “muscle” in your brain.
Push email to low-energy hours. Email and texts often come with a false sense of urgency that they don’t actually merit. Most of these messages don’t need your immediate attention. Your lower afternoon energy is a good match for handling email and texts, because generally, you don’t have to pay attention to any one of them for very long. Energy for this level of engagement can be boosted briefly by stretching, grabbing a handful of nuts, or having a bit of chocolate.
Limit what gets your attention before noon. If your work includes genuinely time-sensitive matters (for example, if you work in Los Angeles and your boss lives in London), you’ll need to answer her most important emails — but not necessarily every email — by 10 AM west coast time. In that case, limit your email time to the 9-10 AM hour. Afterward, turn off emails and take a five-minute break to reset your mental focus — look out the window or step outside for some air. Then, dive into your main project for the next couple of hours.
Meet in the afternoon. Wage a campaign to push meetings to noon or later. If time zones make that difficult, then limit morning meetings to one or two days a week so that you have the majority of mornings available to direct your best and highest energy toward your priorities.
Don’t allow routine to interrupt productivity. If you’re on a team or in a business that has a daily meeting, persuade the team leader to let the team establish the optimal meeting time — that way, it won’t interrupt everyone’s peak productivity.
Tip: Get creative about this. For example, one remote team moved their daily morning meeting to the 5-6 PM hour Monday-Thursday. This lets everyone stay focused on being productive throughout the day and helps them make a clean plan for the following day. They used to quit work at 5 PM daily, so to make up for the extra hour, the team now closes shop at 1 PM on Fridays. What had once been an annoying interruption became an event that makes the team stronger and happier.
Adjust for outliers. If you’re one of the creative breed whose greatest mental output occurs late at night, like a night owl, then capitalize on that energy by arranging to sleep late in the morning. Many companies and bosses are more flexible about time these days (thanks to the pandemic and remote work), so you may find it’s possible to adjust your schedule as long as you can demonstrate that your productivity rises accordingly.
Create an attention habitat. Did you know that your brain associates different physical settings with specific tasks? So, during your deep-attention hours, move to a different seat or room, put on headphones with non-distracting sounds (whale song, rain, moody music, etc.), or change the lighting – create a physical change to signal your brain that you’re in the no-interruption attention zone. Also, during this time, turn off your phone, mute your computer notifications, and shut the door if you have one.
5. Wrapping up
The reason time management systems fail is that they measure and monitor the wrong thing. It’s not time that needs to be managed, but rather how you spend your valuable and limited attention during the morning.
What matters is meaningful work – that is, what’s important and satisfying to you and contributes to others. Attention management is directly related to that meaningfulness, while time management is more about juggling logistics. That’s why “getting everything done” is an incorrect objective, as “everything” doesn’t have equal meaning… it turns your day into an inconsequential marathon compared to focusing attention on what really matters.
So, the next time you’re worried about managing your time, ask yourself instead what you’re giving your attention to. Do you let a constant stream of distractions fracture your attention? Or do you know how to devote your peak mental energy to what’s most important? At the end of any given day, how you managed your time is often irrelevant – after all, no one ever achieved greatness by clock-watching. It’s how you leverage your attention and use it to make real progress that matters.