Escape the time trap

It’s unanimous—everyone is overworked! The agendas of managers and leaders in particular are objectively overloaded. They receive a continuous flow of emails throughout the day, and become submerged with information to be processed. Meetings tend to proliferate in today’s increasingly complex organizations. Managers must constantly launch new projects, to keep up in an intensely competitive world where change is fast and frequent.

The business world may be spinning faster and faster, but curiously, different individuals experience time in different ways. Take three division heads in a large industrial company, for example. The first constantly moans that he never has enough time. He runs from meeting to meeting and committee to committee, spends half the week on a plane or in a car, and is forced to bring work home on the weekends if he wants to think in peace. The second isn’t bothered by too many meetings, because he carefully sets aside the time needed to do the thinking needed to move strategic projects forward. For him, it’s the unexpected emergencies that make life impossible. “As organized as I am, there’s always some crisis to manage, a new strategic issue or request that needs urgent attention. I can’t seem to make headway on my basic work.” The third finds this astonishing: “It’s true that the pace is pretty fast, and there isn’t a lot of down time. But generally speaking, it’s manageable.” How is it that three people with very similar responsibilities and performance levels manage their time so differently?

In fact, personal factors are the main reason that people feel overloaded and can’t seem to manage their time effectively. Thus, while influencing external constraints may be difficult, we can still do something about the demands we place on ourselves!