5 Lesser Known Facts About Time Management

Time management can be a useful tool in our day to day life. We can describe time management as “behaviour that aims at achieving an effective use of time while performing certain goal-directed activities”. We have talked about time management in a couple of our previous post. Methods like the Pomodoro technique are extremely popular and very helpful. I have personally used it on several occasions and found it to be really effective. So, on today’s post, I decided to share some interesting facts about time management techniques. 

1) Popularity of Time Management Could Be The Effect of Capitalism:

In his article Why time management is ruining our lives, Oliver Burkeman attributes the increasing influence of time management to capitalism. He points out a prediction made by a 1930s economist called John Maynard Keynes. Keynes predicted that within one century humans would have reached such high economic growth that no human would work more than 15 hours per week. Keynes thought that the biggest challenge for humanity would be figuring out how to spend all the extra free time. As we all know now, this prediction never became reality. There are several arguments regarding why this is the case, but Oliver Burkeman attributes this to capitalism. 

The simplest answer is “capitalism”. Keynes seems to have assumed that we would naturally throttle down on work once our essential needs, plus a few extra desires, were satisfied. Instead, we just keep finding new things to need. 

Human desire kept growing, but time remained limited. This led to the emergence of time management gurus. The doctrine of time management provides us with the hope that all the tasks that we wish to do can be done within a limited period of time. It gives the illusion that one day all our work would be done, but forgets that in the modern world work is limitless. To highlight this, Burkeman points out the correlation between the idea of efficiency and time management. In the modern world, employment is limited and employers prefer to hire employees that are efficient. Efficiency, in a capitalist setting, is the promise of doing a work better, more cheaply, and in less time, essentially treating a human like a machine. If you complete the work efficiently, the expectation from you increases and you are allotted more work. This way, efficiency is a means to persuade others to do more work in the same amount of time while also convincing them that it is essential to keep their job. Then the question is, how can an employee complete all the work in a limited amount of time? Time management gurus answered this question by coming up with different time management methods. Today, managing your time efficiently is considered an important part of your life. Having free time gives us the impression that we are not doing something right and may even be criticised by others for the same. People often have to work long hours to live up to this idea of efficiency, and, in some cultures, working long hours is a matter of pride.  

Perhaps we should stop somewhere and ask what we really want from life? Is the goal of your life just to produce more and more for someone else? Maybe we should allot specific free time into our day or maybe we should limit our work to just a few hours? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

2) Time Management Alone Cannot Improve Your Academics or Your Job Performance: 

There are several empirical evidence from research in the early 1990s to the early 2000s that found that efficient time management lead to greater academic performance. These researches concluded that there was a clear correlation between academic performance and student’s ability to manage time efficiently (source). But these researches could not find any strong influence of time management over job performance (source). So, time management is positively correlated to academic performance but not job performance? What could be causing this difference? Answer to this can be found in more modern researches.

In 2019, a new research found that time management is not a standalone factor that can affect academic performance. In fact, they found time management to be responsible for less than 14% of the variability of the GPA, meaning that it is not a powerful predictor of GPA performance. Just because you use time management does not mean you will get a good GPA because there are other factors like study strategies, problem-solving skills, socio-economic conditions, personality, and motivation that govern good performance. There may even be other factors that are yet to be discovered (source).

The lack of correlation between time management and job performance could be because the influence of time management is even less than 14% in a job environment. This would mean practicing time management in a job environment is meaningless or may have negligible effect.

3) Time Management Plans Are Notoriously Hard to Implement:

There are several factors that play a role in the successful implementation of time management. Because of this, it is very difficult to plan time management and then implement it.

Firstly, you require a decent amount of motivation to go through with the plan. Studies have found that students who implement time management plans have a self-regulatory mental framework. They are able to stay on a task for extended periods of time with shorter breaks. This requires a lot of motivation, and you’re more likely to give up if the task is too difficult. One study found that you are more likely to complete the task if you have an intrinsic reason to do it. So, you should deliberate on your reason to do something before allocating time to it (source).

Secondly, people tend to underestimate or overestimate how long it would take to complete the task. If you underestimate the time, you will have to end the task in between and move on to something else. On the other hand, if you overestimate the time, you are more likely to believe that the task is difficult, which will affect your motivation. In such cases, flexibility becomes an important factor (source). 

Typically, most students are inclined towards goal setting and prefer to be organised, but they are less likely to follow through with the plan using a proper strategy. This is because efficient time management is learnt through repeated practice of efficient learning strategies (source). This may sound paradoxical because you usually manage time to allow for efficient learning, then how can efficient learning be the factor that improves the efficiency of your time management? This is the point where I must stress the importance of the cycle of self regulated learning. As per this cycle, you’re supposed to start with a minimal amount of motivation, go through the whole cycle, and, at the third phase, noticing how efficiently you completed the task, gain more motivation and have the feedback from this initial cycle to more efficiently restart the whole process in your next study session. 

So, if you want to be good with time management, I suggested reading my article: 3 Phases of Self Regulated Learning for Expertise

4) Time Management Gives Us a Sense of Control and Reduces Stress:

Closely linked to the initial point, time management gives us a sense of control over our tasks and helps regulate our behaviour. This leads to better mental health. Studies have found that students who felt like they were in control of their own time reported a greater sense of work life balance, reported a lower sense of work overload, and experienced less tension than their peers. It also increases their physical health in situations where they can balance sleep, exercise, and appropriate diet (source).  

As a caveat, I must mention that this does not mean the points made by Oliver Burkeman are wrong. Time management is essentially a balancing act between demand of time and your autonomy. This balancing act limits the benefits of time management to situations where a sufficient amount of your autonomy is maintained (source). Therefore, you must not plan out every single moment of the day. Imagine not being able to see a doctor because your schedule is full of tasks that you need to complete in order to be efficient. 

5) Short Range Planning is More Likely to Work than Long Range Planning:

Studies have found that students who set short-term goals are more likely to succeed because of the requirement for flexibility in life. In a normal person’s life, we can’t predict everything that happens. Planning for weeks or months in advance often leads to a situation where the schedule is not flexible, which means the person would be unable to deal with unexpected challenges. But a student is supposed to deal with changing circumstances in relation to coursework and other issues. Therefore, students are more likely to complete the task when they set daily time management plans which keeps an element of flexibility (source).