Why Do We Insist On Micro-Managing Our Time?

After a year of living and travelling through the Balkans, I’ve been faced with a surprising reality: not all cultures perceive time in the same way.?

It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around as a westerner. Living in Australia, most of life was organised into hours and minutes. Doctor appointments, university classes, public transport, bureaucracy, even visiting friends - everything is done by hourly (or quarter hourly) appointments.?

But in countries like Albania and Macedonia, time is polychronic. Meaning, it’s normal for multiple tasks to be carried out simultaneously. Appointments are rare, and things like vet visits and bureaucracy are governed more by relationships, than strict schedules. To my surprise, it’s not uncommon to contact a veterinary clinic to book an appointment for your dog, and be told to come anytime between 9am and 6pm. It’s safe to say, it took me a while to adjust.

When we started working on Projects - our Theory of Constraints (TOC) based project management software - late last year, it didn’t take long for the topic of time management to come up. Most of us working in a project environment are used to estimating tasks in hours. In order to organise a project, we need to estimate how long each task will take and hours seems to be the natural go-to. Nonetheless, I found myself questioning it.?

I’ve always been someone who has been obsessed with optimising my workflow. As a self diagnosed over achiever, I’ve tried every self management tool under the sun. To do lists, Kanban boards, Pomodoro timers - the list goes on. But the same thing always happened. No matter how conservative I was, my time estimates would always be off. I’d over run a task, begin to panic, and the whole day would spiral. I’d end up getting only half of what I’d planned to do done.?

After taking a deep dive into TOC and buffer management, I realised what I was facing. By estimating tasks in hours, we were adding unnecessary complexity to our project plans. Outside of, say, the mining industry where tasks are completed by multiple resources in rapid succession, organising task times down to the minute is pointless. In an R&D or software development project, a singular task is more often completed by a single person. Even if a particular task, such as a design adjustment or a bug fix, takes under an hour, it’s often not implemented by the next person the moment it's completed. More often than not, it takes a few hours or a day before the next task is started.?

Why then, do we insist on scheduling down to the minute or hour? Most of us agree by now that hours spent on a task doesn’t equate productivity, and certainly not quality. But save from doing the complicated task of measuring output quality, there isn’t a clear alternative to the way we measure and organise work.?

In designing Projects, I was adamant in finding a new way. We started testing our planning techniques in house, and what we found was interesting.?

Instead of estimating tasks in hours, we started estimating them in days - capping our smallest estimated time at half a day. This allowed us to put more focus on the task itself, whilst still being able to organise our projects based on a deadline.?

Admittedly, it was a subtle shift, and still one reliant on the concept of time spent, but it seemed to have a drastic psychological effect. By allocating the unit of a day, or half day, to a singular task, the focus shifted from counting minutes, to completing the task at hand. In other words, from work as imagined to work as done.

When we plan in hours we have a tendency to stack things close together. At 9am, we begin working on a task, by 11am we expect ourselves to be done and onto the next thing, at 12pm we should be onto another, etc. But we all know the reality of how that goes. One incident - an email, a distracting co-worker, an unexpected complication - and the whole schedule is knocked off balance. That task we were allocated two hours to do, now takes most of the day, and everything else is pushed into being late. TOC addresses this issue by allocating safety buffers to each project, but can we take it one step further? Can we use psychology to reduce the need for these buffers in the first place?

After switching to a day estimate basis, I realised I’d been working half mindedly. My fear of getting behind on my daily schedule meant that I always had one eye on the clock. If I spent 15 minutes or an hour more than I had planned to on one task, it became a threat to the whole day, and the whole project. And so, I would consistently pull myself out of my work, to see if it was five past three, or twenty past three.?

Working like this makes it nearly impossible to reach a flow state. Whilst we may be spending the whole hour with the intention of working on one task, our mind’s never truly come to the table. By failing to focus - completely and utterly - on a task, we often fail to do our best work. Nor our most efficient work and we certainly don’t enjoy it as much. Unfortunately, this is how most of us work.??

We plan each day expecting ourselves and our workers to function like machines. We’ve convinced ourselves that every hour in the work day is equal, and that by micro-managing the minutes we spend on a task - that we will reach optimal productivity. We are imagining how our work can be done, instead of allowing the reality of what we can do to be the focus.?

The simple shift of planning in days, not hours, gives our minds more space. We all intrinsically know how long a day is. It’s built into our biology. We know when the sun goes down, and we know when the end of the work day is. But we don’t naturally know what time it is at any given moment in the day. By shifting our timelines to days, we may still allocate the same amount of time to a task as we would using hours. But we are able to take advantage of our biology in a completely different way. We no longer have to devote half of our brains to knowing if we are on schedule or not. We don’t overload ourselves on an hourly basis. We know the one or two things that need to get done, and we can focus on getting them done before the sun goes down (or the lights go off).?

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