Escape the Race

“Time is the main thing. It’s the only thing." - Miles Davis

There are 25 million meetings per day in the US! More than $37 billion per year is spent on unproductive meetings. Middle management employees spend 35% of their time in meetings while this number goes up to 50% for the senior management. On an average 4 hours per week are spent on preparing for status update meetings.

I am sure the numbers in India may not be drastically different, hence I wasn’t surprised when the clients coaching agenda was ‘TIME MANAGEMENT’. A term I have grown to dislike, for the simple facts that what do you manage that cannot be controlled and stopped and paused.

My client was a high potential young manager who struggled with coming to work on time, finishing his tasks on time and generally wrestled against the clock every day! The organization believed in his capability and potential and hence I was called to work with him and help him with time management so that he could move up the ladder. My first meeting started 15 minutes late and that sort of set the tone for the all the discussions I was to have with him. Sharp, intelligent, committed and humble is how I would describe this client. He had tried everything under the sun to fix his problem. He had an alarm set that required him to solve a new puzzle every day before he could snooze the alarm! He would ask his spouse to hide the phone previous night so that he could have to wake up and search for his phone when the alarm went off, prompting him to move around and wake up. This didn’t work after some time.

He was struggling and he felt guilty for letting everyone down. His manager was a kind hearted man who would talk to him about timelines and try to mentor him. Nothing was working for him and he was feeling hopeless. Everyone joked about his time management. He had given up on himself. He was heading the engineering design team and was integral part of the new products that the company was launching. An important member who had all the capabilities and yet was not at his best because he couldn’t manage time!

A couple of meetings and I realized that he had convinced himself that Time was not his best friend. I asked him to drop time management from his agenda and explore other things that are important for him. A few days later he was attending my workshop on managerial excellence. One of the task was to look at the different activities for a manager and schedule them. Every one tried to fit in the activities fro, 9 am to 6 pm. My first question was, what if the first meetings goes on for 45 minutes over the time schedule?  Everyone said they would need more time to then reschedule the day since this would have a cascading effect on the schedule.

This was the aha moment for him, he then decided to prioritize the activities and apply the ‘DO/ DELEGATE / DUMP’ logic. What it did was helped his identify what mattered and honestly given our VUCA world, we cannot always control the duration of time we can give a task, things get delayed, abrupt meetings take our time and sudden emergencies take priority over what might have been planned earlier. However having clarity on what matters helps us be effective and he understood that being more effective is what matters over being good with managing time! Its ok if he comes 15 minutes late to a meeting, but if he is going to add value in the next 20 minutes and deliver, Its OK!  

This effectiveness over time management is also the foundation of finding balance in life, flexibility in organization for allowing employees to choose their work hours and most importantly understand that being on time is not guarantee of being effective.

The freedom to choose is the first step to delivering results and not necessarily being the rat in the time race!