Busy Is Good, Idle Is Bad

People spent the most time ‘dealing with incoming demands day to day’, closely followed by ‘participating in calls and meetings’. ‘Doing deep thinking/productive/creative work alone’ came last, and for many ‘the real work gets done outside of working hours’. Most of us are guilty of squandering our time at work, distracted by our surroundings, checking emails or social media, or procrastinating when starting a piece of work. As working hours have lengthened and work–home boundaries have dissolved, it’s easy to assume we’ll get round to doing tasks later in the day. As one survey respondent commented mournfully, ‘there are no hard stops any more’. Our work culture is intensively meeting heavy, and our discipline around meeting management is often woeful. Furthermore, many participants are in listening mode only. Downtime at work for any reason – reading, reflection, stepping away to gain perspective, taking breaks, chatting with others – tends to be labelled as unproductive time. Being lost in thought looks like idling. The accepted norm is to appear busy because this sends the signal that we are productive, important and achieving great things. But if you want to get to senior positions, working part time isn’t always going to help you achieve this. A pervasive ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitude still exists in our work culture.

Easy From Now On

As explained by a senior business leader, ‘A partner who works three days a week is constantly worried about opportunities passing them by because they are not working on Mondays and Fridays. I have to be on guard to make sure that they don’t get left out of stuff. Because that is what happens when you’re not around. It goes to somebody else. We tend to value our future time less than our time today. So we say ‘yes’ more often to requests that require our time in the future, then realize too late that we’ve overcommitted. Additionally, we’re happy to rely on intuition over evidence when planning and scoping, but this frequently leads us to be overconfident in our estimates – remember Kahneman’s research? We are often mindful when it comes managing our own time, but tend to be far less cognizant of the impact of our own choices and decisions on other people’s time. We routinely accommodate these behaviours without asking whether there is a better way. Has technology contributed to our time blindness? Or is it helping us to collectively value and manage our time better? Yes, and yes – like so many things, technology is not purely harmful or purely helpful. Today’s tools that enable remote working, team collaboration, knowledge management and communications have removed much of our need to be physically present in an office in order to participate in meetings, access and share information, or work on deliverables together. The great benefit this brings is the ability to tailor our working hours and location in a way that helps us to manage our life outside of work. We are also able to reach out to colleagues around the world who have the knowledge we need to draw upon.

Hard To Believe

Intranets, online communities and workplace messaging tools help us to find and connect easily with others who can share valuable expertise and experience. We can work more efficiently too. But all this information at our fingertips and all these tools at our disposal often lead to overload, complexity, inefficiency and exclusive rather than inclusive behaviours. We don’t always use or organize our technology in a way that helps us to make the best use of our time. It isn’t always clear what tool or communication channel we should use for what purpose. If we throw an idea ‘out there’ for reactions, it’s far too easy to move to a decision or action when we’ve received a few speedy responses from those colleagues who happen to be online at the same time. By missing other perspectives, we are closing down opportunities for debate and constructive challenge, and rushing to potentially hasty decisions. Then we can waste hours across our working week through a host of ‘time sinks’. We are increasingly aware of the negative impact of technology on our wellbeing, particularly at work. Not only do multitasking and attentional switching overload our cognitive functioning, but many of us struggle to switch off from our addictively designed devices and take proper breaks. ‘Is your green light on in Microsoft Teams? Where does time blindness lead? Now we have understood more about this affliction, we can start to explore some of the symptoms that it triggers. How does it affect the way organizations function? Our time blindness isn’t a harmless condition.

Shake Your Foundations

Like blind spots when driving, it can be downright dangerous. Time blindness causes flaws and dysfunctions in the way we operate, and these ‘defects’ prevent us from collectively delivering our best work. They also create barriers that make it harder for people to bring their whole selves to work and to flourish in their careers. We have learned to accommodate the defects unquestioningly as a necessary feature of working life. Occasionally they are thrown into sharp relief by external crises such as economic downturns, environmental disasters or pandemics. Here are eight examples of time defects that occur in organizations. We’d just have a discussion about it. But there’s this constant need for masses and masses of documentation around everything. It’s a complete waste of time. This time drain is borne out by a 2017 study1 which found board members spent on average just under four hours reading their papers for each meeting, up 30% in six years. But it isn’t just about time as an input into board decisions. In professional services, firms try to bill as many hours as they can to each client, with the primary goal of maximizing partner profits at the end of the year. The closest that leadership teams get to this is when they agree their quarterly priorities. But the discipline required to keep checking on this is often lacking, according to executive coaches I’ve interviewed. This is compounded by the huge investment of personal time and energy that many business leaders dedicate to their jobs.