It’s time, stupid!

“It is time, stupid!” is how the much-needed campaign slogan would read. Time is man’s last asset. Perception of time is in part personal and in part cultural. Some people’s mind is of the ‘we-have-plenty-of-time-for’ type and others’ is of the ‘there-is-no-time-for’ type. Both may be looking at exactly the same issue, the same timetable, the same facts! These differences are well-rooted in our brains and differentiate us, one from the other. There are also big trans-cultural East-West differences although neo-global-capitalism is homogenising the business world and global executives start to look alike.

Yet, time is elusive. We have been taught that we have to make ‘efficient use of time’ but we are not sure what that means exactly other than being able to do what needs to be done! In the old days, we used to send our managers to time management courses. I have been invited (forced?) to attend several of these in my previous business life and always ended up with a new filofax, daytimer or some other kind of binder.

The fundamental flaw with these courses - both the old ones and the new electronic-world ones - is that they assume there’s a universal best way of managing a supposedly universal time-control-and-efficiency problem. They work for many people, don’t get me wrong. But they do not account for the individualised ‘concept of time’. For example, it is possible to dissect the day into bits and allocate them to, let’s say ‘meetings’. But it would be more difficult to universally distribute the time between let’s say ‘time to do’ and ‘time to think’. The latter is tricky because we all differ in the way we do it.

For many people, the simple dictation “now, stop and think” is a recipe for mental block. For these people, ‘thinking’ (about new ideas, new angles, possibilities of tackling A or B, solving X or Y, my next steps) is something that happens all the time. These people may have peaks of ‘aha!’ driving home, in the middle of the night or whilst attending a conference on a topic miles away from the ‘object of their thoughts’. Other people seem to grab this invitation with both hands adopting the opportunity to have a pre-scheduled afternoon dedicated to non-operational worries. It is part of our own personal and professional development to figure out what works best for us and - once we figured it out - to try to develop mechanisms to do what I have called ‘protect time’.

More on this in my next post...

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