Blog Layout
All you need to know about Time Intelligence in 5 minutes
Nov 23, 2023
Want to overcome resourcing constraints, meeting overload, employee burnout? In the time it'll take you to enjoy a cuppa, these 10 Q&As tell you how.
What’s the problem? Why do we need time intelligence?
We work long hours yet our productivity levels are not what they could be. The incidence of stress and mental ill-health has been rising steadily, costing employers and health services billions every year. And as organisations are failing to meet the needs of different groups of employees, they are making glacial progress towards their diversity goals. The answer isn’t to exhort people to work faster or harder or smarter: it’s the system we need to fix. We need to create more sustainable, inclusive, productive organisations and ways of working that will allow all kinds of talent to flourish.
What is time intelligence?
Time intelligence is our collective ability to notice how we’re spending our time at work and to make thoughtful decisions about how we invest our many hours of work so that we get a better return on that time investment, for ourselves, our clients, the businesses we work for and indeed the people who are important to us outside of work.
Time intelligence offers a framework and language to help people explore and understand their work culture, ways of working and organisational or team set-up so they can figure out how to improve these to boost both their own performance and enjoyment of work and the business’ performance.
How is time intelligence different to traditional time management?
Traditional time management focuses almost exclusively on efficiency – doing things faster, wasting less time, getting more done within the time available. It’s also very task-focused and aimed solely at the individual – think of it as helping us to spin ever faster on our hamster wheels! Time intelligence is still about doing things efficiently but it’s also about our experience of work and the human, social dimension as much as the task, so that we can slow down our hamster wheels, change course or even step off occasionally. Because our working time is highly interdependent and we don’t work in isolated bubbles, time intelligence is primarily aimed at whole teams and organisations, not just individuals.
What are the warning signs that tell me we need to focus on our time intelligence?
How do you create more time intelligent organisations?
Ideally you start at the top, by getting time intelligence on your leadership agenda and defining as a leadership team what time intelligent ways of working look like for your business and the outcomes you’re seeking. Then you engage other teams in a similar conversation through interactive sessions to help them identify changes within their control that will help them work smarter not harder whilst building on all the positive things they like about working there. Broader issues or opportunities outside of their direct control are fed back to the leadership team.
After this initial stage, you will likely have identified a number of organisation-wide changes to implement so the next stage is to set up these pilots with selected teams, support them and evaluate the benefits afterwards. At a team level, you can help each team to develop a Team Time Contract
which is an informal agreement about how they’ll manage their time across the team. Throughout this process you may want to offer 1:1 support to certain individuals in key roles or who may be in need of additional help for a while to deal with time pressure or manage their workloads.
Who is time intelligence for?
Time intelligence is a mindset and a set of skills that’s for leadership teams, project/functional teams and whole organisations to apply. But you can grow your time intelligence as an individual too and on my group coaching programmes and in my 1:1 coaching sessions I help people do exactly that.
Can you give me some examples of time intelligence in action?
In The Future of Time
I set out the 6 traits of time-intelligent teams and organisations, these are:
2. They minimise distractions and help people focus on the important work
3. They create healthy habits and environments that enable people to do their best work.
4. They recruit, manage, develop and reward people in a way that encourages best use of time
5. They value humanity, social cohesion and wellbeing and work to reduce cognitive overload, burnout and loneliness.
6. They prize experimentation, learning and open-mindedness.
The book also offer 24 ‘time solutions’ which are examples of things time-intelligent organisations do day-to-day. For a preview of the book’s index and first few pages, click here. When I work with clients, the actions vary significantly depending on their context, ambition and challenges. We might do some cross-team process mapping to clarify work handovers and deadlines; we might look afresh at the meeting culture and/or introduce organisation-wide meeting-free windows or days; or we might look to formalise ‘deep thinking’ time or informal learning time.
How can we measure our time intelligence?
What can I do tomorrow to engage people in a conversation about this?
1. What helps or hinders you from making the most of your time at work?
2. What doesn't appear in your work calendar that you would like to see in there?
3. How can I help you free up your time to focus on the important work?
If you’re finding it hard to persuade people back into the office in a regular rhythm, you could ask them what makes office time rewarding and useful, and use these insights to tailor your firm-wide working policies.
If I haven’t got a budget to spend on external support, what free resources can I access?
If you’re facing some of the challenges I’ve described above and think you could do with a bit more ‘time intelligence’ to help your teams thrive and your business to perform better, then book a free half hour call with me and let's chat.
Enjoyed reading this? Share it with others
Recent blogs
What does time off mean to you? How well do you 'not work'?
I waved a Minion off to school yesterday for World Book Day. At least my 12 year old daughter now sorts out her own WBD outfit thank goodness, and there’s now another 364 days before WBD rolls around again. But we’re not done for this week because it's International Women’s Day today! In recognition of this global celebration of women’s contribution to work and society, every day this week I’ve been sharing a statistic on Linked In that describes how women are impacted by our 'time culture' at work. If ‘time culture’ is a new expression to you a) you obviously haven’t read my award-winning business book The Future of Time yet and b) it means our attitudes, behaviours and expectations around the way we spend our time at work. What gets valued and rewarded, what doesn’t. What we spend much of our time on, what we don’t spend so much time on (but ought to). Because surprise, surprise, women are disadvantaged by our ‘time culture’ in several ways. Here are my top five.
Making change stick. Recently, I’ve been tuning in regularly to the 'Just One Thing' podcast by Dr. Michael Mosley. In each 15-minute episode, Michael delves into a single, manageable change that can enhance our health and extend our lifespan. Thanks to him, I’m keeping up my green tea ritual (that was a quick win), incorporating daily planks into my exercise routine (right after my morning run - oof) and reheating leftover carbs. I’m a bit of a podcast butterfly and I’m wondering why this podcast has stuck firmly now as a favourite. Besides Dr. Mosley's warm and reassuring tone, I think it boils down to 3 things. Firstly, focusing on just one thing feels refreshingly attainable. Let's face it, we're bombarded with complex self-improvement strategies daily. Who wants a whole industry of new ‘to do’s to implement, remember and track? Secondly, the changes are entirely within my control. I don't need anyone's permission to start planking in my bedroom, even if it does provide my husband with daily amusement. I can make these changes tomorrow, better still, today. Thirdly, the advice is specific and the outcomes are clear. I know precisely what to do and whether it’s working. Whether it's keeping my blood pressure in check or reducing blood sugar spikes, the benefits are measurable. Now, shifting gears to my work life, I find parallels between Dr. Moseley's approach and my Time-Intelligent Teams workshops. These workshops aim to enhance teams' productivity and enjoyment at work – to help people to invest their time more effectively. We focus on one collective and one individual change that are within the team's control. Through reflection, brainstorming, and laughter, teams identify actionable steps to work smarter, not harder. The feedback from these workshops has been resoundingly positive with managers reporting improved communication, higher levels of commitment to the change and more cohesive teamwork. Of course the power of ‘just one thing’ is that once you’ve mastered that one change and it has proven it’s value, it simply becomes part of how you do things. Which leaves you free to cast around for the next ‘just one thing’ that could also have a transformative effect. And another after that. That’s why, to my amazement, wall squats have joined my daily exercise routine and I’m evangelising about the benefits of cooked tomatoes. I just need to find Michael’s episode on why sticky toffee pudding will reverse the ageing process…..
How are those 2024 goals looking? If you’re the type of person who loves setting New Year resolutions and making aspirational plans for the coming 12 months, but then feels downcast a few weeks or months later when all those intentions look over-ambitious or have fallen by the wayside, then this blog post will cheer you up, I guarantee. Because I’ve discovered a better way to start the year: by recognising that we’re already living our future today. Let me unpack that. People today say they are time poor and the stats shed light on why: work intensity has increased steadily over the past 20 years, leisure time has fallen - plus we don’t tend to use it wisely - and we spend more of our time parenting our children than previous generations, or caring for elderly dependents. When we’re time poor, we tend to feel under pressure to get things done, stay on top of things and keep all those plates spinning as efficiently as possible. We’re always thinking about what’s coming up next and the future that we’re working towards. (My vision of the future? Older me is effortlessly churning out bestseller books from an idyllic coastal eco-cottage, in between bouts of sea-swimming and long clifftop yomps. What’s yours?). The problem is, that future is always slightly out of grasp. So we keep on striving to get there. Hand-in-hand with tomorrow-chasing is beating ourselves up about the big things what we haven’t achieved yet or on a smaller scale, tasks we haven’t ticked off our daily or weekly to-do lists. I had a great 2023 – busy, healthy, enjoyable – but reading back over my mid-year plan was a frustrating litany of ‘not done’, ‘not done’, ‘not done’, from my updating my website to launching my new Time-Intelligence online diagnostic for teams and organisations. Hal Hershfield, Professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management and author of Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today came on my podcast The Business of Being Brilliant in September. He advises ‘ not to always live life for tomorrow’ and to ‘ have some self compassion and self forgiveness. It's really easy to beat ourselves up because we're falling short of the things that we said we wanted to do. And that's not really fair to our present selves’. What we don’t typically pay so much attention to – or even notice at all – are all the things we’re already doing today that are to be celebrated or that quite simply, we find enjoyable or rewarding. As Hal says ‘ I think we do a disservice to our future selves by telling ourselves that we're working for them, but in reality we're missing the present and then what sort of life does that add up to?’ I notice the same unhelpful tendency in organisations, where we’re equally future-obsessed. As soon as one project is over, the next one begins. We sprint from one deadline to the next without pausing for breath or taking time to reflect, appreciate, learn or reconsider. It’s a common refrain I hear people say in my Time-Intelligent Teams workshops . It’s a chronic case of organisational impatience, and it’s not a recipe for long-term, sustainable high performance. So what’s the antidote? It’s to ask ourselves ‘are we there already?’ This question is reminiscent of the dreaded ‘are we there yet?’ that every child asks, usually 10 minutes after leaving home (yep, you did it too) and that makes every driver want to scream. But ‘are we there already?’ is different. It invites us to reflect on what we’re doing today and the outcomes we’re bringing about. It helps us to see afresh the seams of richness layered through our work or home lives that we’ve been neglecting to notice and whose absence we’d sorely regret. By asking ‘are we there already?’ or ‘am I there already?’, we can look differently at what we spend our time on today and appreciate those things we do that are working well for us right here, right now. In other words, the ways in which we’re already living our future today. In my #timeintelligence workshops, I help teams identify all the positive aspects of the way they work that is enabling them to deliver on their goals, often under intense time pressure and resource constraints. In parallel with celebrating these strengths and successes, we look for changes within their control that can help them overcome the challenges or frustration and make best use of their time at work. So instead of setting some traditional resolutions, why not try setting some ‘living my future today’ resolutions? By listing a few things that you already do and would like to continue doing/do more often because they bring you joy, respite, connection, growth, inspiration, fulfilment, contentment or some other benefit. Here are some of my ‘living my future today’ resolutions: 1. Doing a short writing sprint every day to make sense of some half-formed musings, explore the seed of an idea or untangle a mental confusion. The world makes a bit more sense after each sprint. 2. Playing the piano every day that I’m at home, because I find it a magical antidote to a racing mind and it brings back treasured memories of jamming on the piano with my father. 3. Keeping up my daily running streak (today was day #1,151) because I love it and I want to stay mobile and independent until I’m headed for the next world. 4. Sticking with my ‘Review, Celebrate, Plan’ habit where at the end of each week, I review how the week has gone, celebrate things I feel proud of and plan for the week ahead. Cup of tea and large slice of cake in hand. 5. Saying yes to coffees and phone calls with friends even when work and life feel too busy and I’m tempted to say ‘not this week’. I never regret making the time. Why not ask the same question to colleagues in your team? Your close friends or family? It might spark a new kind of conversation. And you might well discover that your future has already arrived.
Pause the hamster wheel and set a more thoughtful course for 2024.
I'm betting it's a question that you might not have asked people for a while. I'm about to persuade you that you should.
Many of us feel like we’re madly spinning plates. So how can we free up our time without metaphorically sweeping up a load of smashed china?
What do you yearn for? For me, it's a slower, simpler life with less 'stuff'.
It’s putting the effort in every day, come rain or shine, that moves us forward.