How to Manage Your Time Better

A woman who schedules operating theatres for a large hospital finds most personal productivity advice faintly comic. Her job is to fit surgeries of unpredictable length into rooms that cost thousands of pounds an hour, using staff who are legally required to sleep. She points out that no theatre manager in the world would attempt what an ordinary office worker attempts daily, which is to plan a day at one hundred per cent capacity and then be surprised when it fails.

Her first principle is that a schedule without slack is not an efficient schedule; it is a fragile one. Theatres are planned to roughly eighty per cent, because the twenty per cent is what absorbs the case that runs long. Without it, one delay at nine in the morning propagates through every list until three surgeries are cancelled at six in the evening. Diaries behave identically. The person whose day is booked back to back is not more productive than the person with gaps; they are simply one overrun away from a week of apologies.

The second principle is that tasks have a shape, and putting them in the wrong slot is the commonest form of waste she sees. Some work requires an uninterrupted block, warms up slowly, and is destroyed by a fifteen-minute interruption because the cost of the interruption is not fifteen minutes but the twenty-five it takes to get back. Other work is genuinely fragmentable and can live happily in the ragged edges of a day. Most people invert this, spending their one clear ninety-minute block on email and then attempting to write something serious in the eleven minutes before a meeting.

Third, she distrusts the to-do list as an instrument, because it has no relationship with time. A list of nine items looks the same whether it represents two hours or two days of work, which is why lists generate guilt rather than output. Her version is to give every item a duration in advance, then add up the numbers, at which point the list stops being an aspiration and becomes a claim that can be tested. Almost everyone, she says, discovers their ordinary day contains about fourteen hours of intended work, and that this arithmetic — not laziness or poor focus — is the actual reason they feel behind.

Fourth, and least popular, she believes cancellation is a skill and most people have never practised it. A theatre list that cannot be completed is shortened deliberately, early, by a person who tells everybody involved. It is not left to fail at the end of the day. The discomfort of a decision made at ten in the morning is far smaller than the chaos of a collapse at six, and yet almost nobody applies this to their own week, preferring to discover on Friday afternoon that three commitments were never possible.

Her final remark undoes half the field. Time management, she says, is very nearly a misnomer, because you cannot manage time; it proceeds regardless and pays no attention to your system. What you manage is your promises. Every technique that works — blocks, buffers, estimates, cancellations — is a technique for making fewer and better promises, to other people and to yourself. Everything that does not work is an attempt to keep the same number of promises faster, and there is no arrangement of a calendar that has ever made that possible.