When bosses go mad obsessing over time management
The conclusions of recent research on better time management by executives always smack of common sense: Schedule shorter meetings; stay off email and exercise, among others.
I don’t know exactly how the world’s best-known business professor and the dean of Harvard Business School (HBS) spend their days.
I do know Michael Porter is busy, and productive, because when I met him, the doyen of competitiveness studies crammed 90 minutes of talk into 55 minutes before heading to the airport. Nitin Nohria, the HBS dean, also juggles a full calendar of meetings and events.
Both men were busy elsewhere when I tried to contact them last month.
I wasn’t surprised, though, to discover that these time-poor, high-profile academics have devoted at least part of recent years to working out how other managers spend their time, because managers are increasingly obsessed with personal productivity.
Twenty-seven chief executives categorised and monitored their activities over three months. Or rather, their executive assistants did. (A great EA — no surprise here — turns out to be indispensable.)
From this data, Prof Porter and Prof Nohria developed some alluring averages.
My concern is that other chief executives will now benchmark their own behaviour against their findings, and be busier and more stressed as a result.
Monitoring of managers has a long pedigree.
Henry Mintzberg started observing them in the 1970s, after noticing academics theorised a lot about management, but had little evidence of what managers actually did.
As a new manager, “you are supposed to figure it out for yourself, like sex,” he wrote, “with equivalently dire initial consequences”.
More recently, Bain & Company consultants surveyed 300 executives and found, for instance, that about 15 per cent of an organisation’s time is spent in meetings— and that percentage is increasing.
The conclusions of recent research always smack of common sense.
Schedule shorter meetings. Stay off email (electronic communications account for nearly a quarter of chief executives’ work time in the Porter/Nohria study).
Meet your team members and customers in person. Exercise. Stay off email. Get a good night’s sleep. Schedule time for spontaneous encounters, paradoxical though that sounds. Stay. Off. Email.
I am afraid of the benchmarking effect, partly because fashions change. The Harvard professors have been checking in on CEOs since 2006 and the sample size is growing, but for now only two of their cohort are women.
Any study starting now would aim for a more diverse group, and probably uncover some different habits.
For example, I expect the current fad for extreme sport and exercise — from paragliding to Ironman challenges — will moderate.
A consultant whose pastime of choice is triathlon, involving at least 15 hours of training a week, told me recently he had asked his coach how to rise to elite level.
He was told he would need to put at least 10 more hours into working out. Those hours would have to come either from his work or, worse, time with his family.
I can also see how technology developed over the past decade is changing the way managers monitor themselves.
Apple is rolling out software to help users tame their iPhone addiction, while other apps allow managers to track what they do as easily as they record steps, heart rate and calories.
Jim Collins, the management writer, has been assessing his productivity for years, and trying to maintain a rolling average of 1,000 creative hours annually.
Quality of time spent, as his approach suggests, is more important than quantity. Time management is the ultimate zero-sum game.
Even if executives organise themselves more efficiently, Prof Mintzberg concluded that they face many “inescapable conundrums” (how do you cope with change and maintain continuity? for example) that will never respond to prescriptions.
Clearly, it makes sense for leaders to be aware of how they are spending, or wasting, their time, and occasionally to step back and look at whether they could handle their limited hours more productively.
Fretting about which trade-offs are “better”, however, is one more way to add to the pressure of the 62.5-hour week worked, according to the Harvard study, by the average US chief executive.
Tom Gentile, who heads Spirit AeroSystems, reprimands himself in an interview linked to the research for spending too much time on email and not enough on hobbies and exercise.
I don’t want unfit chief executives to collapse, but if they occasionally trade hours on the exercise bike for, say, reading novels, or listening to music, without setting a timer, they shouldn’t rebuke themselves.
In fact, Mr Gentile passes more time with customers and suppliers than his peers. He spends nearly two-thirds of his hours away from work with his family, against 47 per cent for the average chief executive.
That sounds pretty creditable to me. Now back to clearing my email inbox. THE FINANCIAL TIMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of The Financial Times.
