Timekeepers

by Simon Garfield

  ii) The Lean Email Simple System

  The study of time management, and the subsequent translation of this knowledge into accessible research and punchy advice in book form, has been going on for a while. The Internet, and a growing awareness of how much time we spend on activities not available to our parents, have hastened the variety and supply of these books, as has the move away from the traditional office and factory-based work towards the freelance and the start-up. But the truly groundbreaking volumes appeared some time before. The most influential appeared in 1989: Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey, who died in 2012, described himself as a ‘lifetime student’ of time management, and believed that the essence of the entire field could be simmered down to the phrase ‘organize and execute around priorities’. Writing his bestselling book, for instance, became his priority for several months, a level of concentration he attained by following his own principle of putting ‘first things first’. He clearly got something right – his publishers claim sales in excess of 25 million copies.3

  In the book, Covey classifies three generations of time management advice, each building on the last. The first revolved around the construction of lists, ‘an effort to give some semblance of recognition and inclusiveness to the many demands placed on our time and energy’. The second generation he classifies as a period of calendars and appointment books, a desire to look ahead and plan. And the third wave is an attempt to prioritise the demands on one’s time, particularly in relation to our values, and to set corresponding goals. But Covey also suggested that the notion of time management was falling from favour; too many lists, and too strict an adherence to targets and goals, hindered human interaction and spontaneity. ‘Time management’ is really a misnomer, he believed. ‘The challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves.’ But his conclusions were drawn up 25 years ago; the crowded shelves today suggest that few agreed with him.

  And there is, after all, a fourth way. This involves a time management matrix Covey divided into four quadrants:

  I. Urgent and Important, i.e. crises and significant deadlines

  II. Not Urgent but Important, such as long-term planning and relationship building;

  III. Urgent and Not Important, such as responding to distracting emails and non-relevant meetings (i.e. activities that others may judge important but you do not – activities based on the expectations of others)

  IV. Not Urgent and Not Important, such as taking a break from normal pressures to enjoy activities that add nothing specific to the working day

  ‘Some people are literally beaten up by problems all day every day,’ Covey writes. ‘[Ninety] per cent of their time is in Quadrant I and most of the remaining 10 per cent is in Quadrant IV, with only negligible attention paid to Quadrants II and III. That’s how people who manage their lives by crisis live.’ Others spend a lot of time in Quadrant III, Covey suggests, ‘thinking they’re in Quadrant I. They spend most of their time reacting to things that are urgent, assuming they’re also important.’ Where then should one spend one’s time? Clearly not in Quadrants III and IV, for those who live there ‘basically lead irresponsible lives’. But it is Quadrant II that provides the heart of effective personal management. ‘It deals with things that are not urgent, but are important. Not only what US presidents once called ‘the vision thing’, but also writing a personal mission statement, clarifying values, taking exercise and preparing oneself mentally for the ambitions ahead. Covey was writing before mindfulness became a conscious force, but that would have been in Quadrant II too.

  The quadrants were intended to apply to a fairly traditional business environment, but can be adapted to a less formal and more private digital world. In both, the message is the same and seemingly obvious: do important things first. Covey then falls back on mantras of the David Brent variety: effective people are not problem minded, they’re opportunity minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems.

  But before these epithets became mantras – in fact, 82 years before – Arnold Bennett wrote the time management book to end (it was perhaps thought at the time) all time management books, and it even had an ironic title: How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day. Bennett is best remembered for his novels based on life in the Potteries, and perhaps for the omelette named after him after his stay at the Savoy.4 His time management book appeared at the height of his fame in 1910, and was so brief that he claimed it was dwarfed by the length of some of its reviews. Judged by today’s standards, his analysis and advice was stern, forthright and patronising; but to his reviewers, and presumably his large readership, his guidance was original and worthwhile.

  Not enough time to do all the things you want to do in the evening? Then get up an hour earlier in the morning. Too tired in the morning to get up an hour earlier and worried about not getting enough sleep? ‘My impression, growing stronger every year [he wrote in an undated preface to a new edition of the book] is that sleep is partly a matter of habit – and of slackness. I am convinced that most people sleep as long as they do because they are at a loss for any other diversion.’ (The doctors he spoke to confirmed this, he wrote.) But how would one start the day without food and servants at the newly proposed, ungodly hour? Why, ask your servant the night before to lay out a tray with a spirit lamp, a teapot and some biscuits. ‘The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.’

  Bennett maintained an upbeat tone; life, he believed, was both wondrous and too short, and although time was finite it was also – contradictory as it may seem – our one renewable resource. ‘The supply of time is truly a daily miracle,’ he proclaimed as if from the pulpit, ‘an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning and lo! Your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life!’ He particularly welcomed the levelling democracy of time – the cloakroom attendant at the Carlton Hotel had as much as the aristocracy she served. Time was not money, as Benjamin Franklin had proclaimed. Neither wealth nor breeding nor genius was ever rewarded by even an extra hour a day; money could be earned, whereas time was priceless.

  Bennett selected some interesting targets, including his own profession. Novels were all very well, but reading them seldom stretched the working day the way a good self-improvement book was able to do. A reader ‘deciding to devote ninety minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans’.

  Poetry, on the other hand, ‘produces a far greater mental strain’ than the novel, and was the highest form of literature: Paradise Lost, he attested, was thus by far the best way to spend your leisure time.5

  Bennett acknowledged that his advice was perhaps a little too didactic and abrupt, but he pressed on. The key to good time management was to respect a pre-ordered daily programme, but not to be enslaved by it. ‘Oh no,’ Bennett had heard a beleaguered wife exclaim, ‘Arthur always takes the dog out for exercise at eight o’clock and he always begins to read at a quarter to nine. So it’s quite out of the question that we should . . .’ The note of finality here, the author suggests, reveals ‘the unsuspected and ridiculous tragedy of a career’.

  And at all costs one must avoid becoming a prig. ‘A prig is a pert fellow who gives himself airs of superior wisdom. A prig is a pompous fool who has gone out for a ceremonial walk, and without knowing it has lost an important part of his attire, namely, his sense of humour.’ The lesson, Bennett claimed, is to ‘remember that one’s own time, and not other people’s time, is the material with which one has to deal; that the earth rolled on pretty comfortably before one had to balance a budget of the hours, and that it will continue to roll on pretty comfortably whether or not one succeeds in one’s new role of chancellor of the exchequer of time.’

  Before Bennett there was Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Published in 1854 this was, the original survivalist meditation on how
to declutter your life and live simply and ‘deliberately’ in a cabin without going completely fruitcake. Thoreau did go a bit fruitcake, though, and he certainly went pretentious: ‘If you have built castles in the air your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.’

  Walden was less a treatise on time management than it was a total soul rethink. Its transcendental showboating was closer to the rhetoric of Seneca and St Augustine than the balanced-life aspirations of Laura Vanderkam or Stephen Covey. But it did have traction. Thoreau held a stargazy and unrealistic vision of the dignity of rural life (he stuck it out in the wild on his ownsome for 26 months), and his tone is both antisocial and elitist. But for those who can’t quite bring themselves to cut loose from the Internet, his heady vision of puritan living among the woodland grubs has become a highly effective (if primitive and unattainable) self-help manual. With Thoreau as your guide you don’t just learn 18 productivity tips to super-boost your workday, you retune your mind to when the earth was primordial and cold, and everyone knew someone who owned a scythe, and the poor were all secretly happy, and you could sit in a chair by a pond for most of the day and contemplate the navel beneath your hair shirt, and a river ran through it. Or, if you liked the sound of all this but were a bit worried about the deer ticks, you could just get camouflaged and go paintballing.

  Of course, we are all time management experts to a degree; every waking decision requires at least some element of temporal expertise. And even the most self-assured are beset by questions that may be interpreted as crises. Our time is short, so what do we prioritise as worthy of it? Who is to say that strawberry picking is preferable to making a lot of money? Will our children benefit doubly from seeing us for four hours every evening as opposed to two?

  And can any of these books really help us in these decisions? Can even the most cogently aligned bullet point and quadrant matrix transform a hard-wired mind? The notion of saving four hours every ten minutes is challenged by The Slow Fix: Why Quick Fixes Don’t Work by Carl Honoré. The book set its tone with an epigram from Othello: ‘How poor are they who have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?’6 The quick fix has its place, Honoré argues – the Heimlich manoeuvre, the duct tape and cardboard solution from Houston that gets the astronauts home in Apollo 13 – but the temporal management of one’s life is not one of them. He reasons that too much of our world runs on unrealistic ambitions and shabby behaviour: a bikini body within a fortnight, a TED talk that will change the world, the football manager sacked after two months of bad results.7 He cites examples of rushed and dismal failings from manufacturing (Toyota’s failure to deal with a problem with a proper solution that might have prevented the recall of 10 million cars) and from war and diplomacy (military involvement in Iraq). And then there is medicine and healthcare, and the mistaken belief – held too often by the media and initially the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation – that a magic bullet could cure the big diseases if only we worked faster and smarter and pumped in more cash. Honoré mentions malaria, and the vague but quaint story of a phalanx of IT wizards showing up at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organisation with a mission to eradicate malaria and other tropical diseases. When he visited he found the offices somewhat at odds with those of Palo Alto (ceiling fans and grey filing cabinets, no one on a Segway). ‘The tech guys arrived with their laptops and said, “Give us the data and the maps and we’ll fix this for you.”’ Honoré quotes one long-term WHO researcher, Pierre Boucher, saying. ‘And I just thought, “Will you now?” Tropical diseases are an immensely complex problem . . . Eventually they left and we never heard from them again.’

  The proper, applied fix to many problems may provide useful tools far beyond their immediate applications: peace negotiators in the Middle East, perhaps, or teens devoted to multi-level gaming challenges, may have fresh insight into entrenched attitudes. And Honoré has a personal quest too: to find a lasting remedy for his chronic bad back, rather than the instant but transient relief he’s put up with for years.

  But Honoré is outnumbered. For every Honoré there are 20 quick-fixers with no time for the long haul. And if the quick fix isn’t quick enough for the quick-fixers, they may depend on the super-quick fix, the kernels of the nuggets of the gems for people with really busy lives. There is, after all, a solution to the problem of not having enough time to read all the time management books: highperformancelifestyle.net. Here, a man called Kosio Angelov, the author of The Lean Email Simple System, has asked 42 productivity management people how they maintain their focus. So Laura Vanderkam and her friends each came up with three bullets to break wasteful daily cycles and help them stay broken. Maura Thomas, for example, the force behind the website Regain Your Time, suggests 1) Be specific and positive: articulate your new single aim (rather than ‘spend less time checking email’). 2) Identify your obstacles. 3) Tie new behaviour to a reward such as a coffee treat.

  George Smolinski, the ‘4-Hour Physician’, advocates 1) Doing your new habit at the same time and in the same surroundings each day. 2) ‘Write it down!’ 3) ‘Eat an elephant.’ (One bite at a time.) And Paula Rizzo, billed on the website as ‘List Producer’, suggests 1) ‘Obviously you must start with a list!’ 2) Split up things into small parts. 3) Reward good work with a treat, ‘like listening to your favourite song’.

  But what happens if your online life is too full to read even these three svelte tips? Then you’re in luck. Because all the strategies from 42 specialists have been reduced down like a good French stock.

  1. (As selected by 15 experts): Start Small and Break Down Your Workload into Manageable Tasks.

  2. (11 votes): Do it Consistently and Don’t Break the Chain.

  3. (10 votes): Have a Plan and Prepare in Advance.

  4. (9 votes): Use an Accountability Buddy – someone who will track your progress and encourage you towards your goals.

  5. (8 votes): Reward Yourself.

  Good luck everyone!

  _______________

  1 Fantastically, should you not have time to read The 12-Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months (208 pages), there is also an abridged version available, containing all the gems (34 pages).

  2 Impeccable source: an item called ‘The Busy Person’s Guide to the Done List’ on the website idonethis.com

  3 There were spin-offs too: the audio book, embedded into the car cassette player of every rep, was the first to sell a million; Living the Seven Habits, the follow-up book, suggested personal applications in the real world; and just when you thought there were no more habits, there was The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness.

  4 Anna of the Five Towns and Clayhanger; haddock and parmesan.

  5 There were a few exceptions: Aurora Leigh, a novel by E.B. Browning, was singled out by Bennett as a magnificent story with ‘social ideas’; the novel is written in verse.

  6 Honoré has entered these waters before. He is the author of the popular gospel of deceleration In Praise of Slow (2004), a persuasive and punchy rationale for the more considered life. It sets out its stall succinctly in the opening paragraph: ‘What is the very first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Draw the curtains? Roll over to snuggle up with your partner or pillow? Spring out of bed and do ten push-ups to get the blood pumping? No, the first thing you do, the first thing everyone does, is check the time.’ The clock, he argues (and who can dispute it?), gives us our bearings, and tells us how to respond. Are we early or late? ‘Right from that first waking moment, the clock calls the shots.’ His book champions another path.

  7 He says that the average tenure of the professional football manager in England has fallen from 3.5 to 1.5 years in the 20 years since 1992.

  ‘What was good to block out the clock? Another clock!’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Life Is Short, Art Is Long

  i) The Clock Is a Clock

  People tend to be snooty about online featur
es made up entirely of lists, but who wouldn’t genuinely enjoy a photo story entitled ‘The 21 Most Unusual Horses That Make Even Unicorns Seem Basic’? Or ‘These 15 Dogs Would Take It Back If They Could . . . Unfortunately They Must Live In Regret’? It was perhaps inevitable that someone with too much time on their hands would make a list called ‘8 Films Where People Hang From Giant Clocks’.1

  1) Safety Last!

  2) Back to the Future. (A bold tribute to Safety Last! as Doc Brown harnesses the power of the Hill Valley clock tower to get Marty McFly back to the present.)

  3) Hugo. (Another tribute to Safety Last! as director Martin Scorsese incorporates a clip of Harold Lloyd, and the whole film, set in a railway station, is inspired by clocks and clockwork precision.)

  4) The Great Mouse Detective. (Sherlockian animated caper in which the evil Ratigan battles Basil and friends atop Big Ben.)2

  5) Shanghai Knights. (Another Sherlockian caper featuring Jackie ‘all his own stunts’ Chan and Owen Wilson. Wilson goes out onto the face of Big Ben, and when he gets there he observes, ‘You’re about to die – you’re on the minute hand of a clock.’)

  6) Project A. (Also featuring Jackie Chan, this time falling from a smaller clock tower after the face springs out from the building, as in Safety Last!)