Are you back at work and full of resolve, gulping green juice, swearing off alcohol and checking out your new yoga app? Guilty as charged. Google Trends shows that searches for “diet” spiked worldwide to its maximum score of 100 in early January, confirming the working assumption that we all like to set ourselves up to fail at the start of a new year.
There’s another diet we all resolve to keep once and for all each January, which matters most at work: the battle of the bulging schedules. Our calendars (or diaries as we Brits say) tend to start the year slim and quickly fatten up. Suffice to say, if hours eaten up were kilos, the scales would rise.
Photographer: Catherine Falls/Moment RF
We are obsessed with time management precisely because it’s so elusive. It’s central to bestselling books such as Atomic Habits, which does for “continuous improvement” this century what The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, did for the last.
Technology is both part of the solution and the problem. Let’s take the bad news first: Research published in the Harvard Business Review in 2022 found that people “toggle” between applications and websites 1,200 times a day on average or 9% of working time over the course of a year. I’m guessing you aren’t surprised. You have the latest scheduling software and bingo, someone drops a meeting into your calendar and before you know it, you’ve lost your concentration.
Time management isn’t the same as task management which is a huge market — set to reach $7 billion for software by 2032 with a compound annual growth rate of 13% — and generally means surveillance. This is when someone else controls your time, not the other way around. What I call pointless presenteeism, showing up to the workplace in person just for the sake of showing up, isn’t a good use of time. Well-structured tasks with high trust on delivery works much better.
Technology frees time, too, of course. McKinsey & Co. estimates that current generative AI and other technologies have the potential to automate work activities that absorb 60% to 70% of employees’ time.
But it’s still not enough — or not the same. That’s because we value time emotionally and it leeches away from us continuously. In the 1930s, philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote to her boyfriend Frank Thompson lamenting that, “Like Proust I want to escape from the eternal push and rattle of time into the coolness and poise of a work of art. But all this requires peace and calm and time, time, time which I haven’t got, oh blazing hell I haven’t got it.”
The diet industry is being transformed by Ozempic and Wegovy. There’s no weekly injection we can take to manage time — yet. It remains down to strategy, tactics and willpower. A study cited by Harvard Health shows that you need a lot of all three, plus much practice to stand a one-in-five chance of being a weight-loss “maintainer.”
I wrote about time management in my book The Simplicity Principle. Successfully managing your time hinges on decision and intent (and, if your have a difficult boss or colleagues, courage). But perhaps the single most useful thing is to really follow the diet analogy and treat your schedule like your body.
Instead of counting carbs and calories or forgoing treats, count the necessary, habitual and toxic drains on your time. Decide which time diet you want to try. It doesn’t matter whether it’s time blocking — marking out specific tasks for a set time of day — or task batching — assigning similar tasks to be done at once — or simply putting on an “OOO” even when you’re in.
Think of these like the Keto or Mediterranean diet or even our old friend the cabbage soup diet, which is still a popular search on Google after all these years.
I’m not saying time diets are any more delicious than other diets. I am saying they matter. And over time they feel great, too.
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