What’s YOUR experience?
I’d love to hear your answers to 5 questions about the 'time culture' in your organisation. Participation is anonymous and I'll share the findings in late November.
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Frogs, celebrities and Gina Ford
Nov 17, 2020
What do you notice when you reflect back on your career? Where might this lead you?
My first experience of the world of work started with clocking in.
As a management trainee at Harrods, I had to swipe in and out at the start and end of each day with my employee ID card. Our daily time records were scrutinised weekly by our line managers, despite giving no indication of how productively we spent our hours in between. That largely depended on whether we worked in a bustling, high-footfall department like the Food Halls or a sleepier outpost such as Lighting, or whether an A-list celebrity was in the store distracting us all with their glorious presence.
Goodbye swipe machines, hello timesheets.
I quickly learned the unspoken truth that there were ‘good’ time codes to use and other time codes to avoid. Billable codes (for client work) trumped all others. But if you weren’t 100% resourced on a project, caution was needed. The ‘admin’ time code could squash any promotion chances if it appeared too often on your timesheet. Far better to demonstrate that your time had been busily devoted to the more purposeful-sounding ‘marketing’ time code or better still, to the loftier timecode for ‘developing new intellectual capital’. Selecting time codes that would send the right signals about my contributions and ambitions honed my resourcefulness and creativity in my early career.
Old habits, new life
After accounting for my time on a daily basis at work for 17 years, this proved a hard habit to break. As a new mother, I enthusiastically embraced Gina Ford’s structured (and divisive) approach to looking after our daughter. I happily wrote out Gina’s daily routines broken down into 15 minute segments and stuck to these religiously. Our daughter thrived and we stayed sane (just). I loved the order that the routines brought to the chaos of those early months. As well as creating space for me to breathe, they enabled me to carve out small chunks of time when I could resume my professional identity and do some freelance work.
Fridges and frogs.
When I returned to work more fully, running professional networks in London, my experience of time changed again. I discovered that surreal phenomenon whereby child-free time ticks by twice as fast as time spent with your child(ren). “Seriously? Pick-up time already?” With this new two-speed time, success meant completing the most important tasks in the short fragments of time between daily travel, calls and meetings. Without being seduced by more urgent or easier tasks. Or knocks on the door. Or our fridge contents.
‘Eating the frog’ is an expression usually attributed to Mark Twain which advocates doing the most important and hardest task(s) first thing in our working day. This is far better for our cognitive functioning and our daily productivity than deferring it until later in the day or tomorrow. I’ve found it tough to stick to but like going out for a run in bad weather, I bask in my sense of achievement (and the warm glow of self-virtue) afterwards.
A new direction.
Reflecting back on the many organisations I've worked in and with, I’ve become fascinated by our attitudes and habits in relation to our time at work. Why are our working hours so much longer than in other European nations and yet our productivity is so much lower? Why are we fixated on measuring time as an input instead of valuing what we actually achieve? What drives our collective frenzy of cramming ever-increasing amounts of activity into our working hours? Surely there’s a better way of managing our time. Exploring these questions has led me, to my surprise, into a new career chapter.
I’m researching and writing a business book titled The Future of Time. In it, I’m explaining how our culture of time at work needs to change. We can find better ways of designing organisations and collectively managing our time that enable us to be more productive, make the most of our diverse talents and live healthier, happier work lives. It’s a complex challenge with no single, quick solution. But it’s achievable. Covid 19 has already proved that we can radically transform the way we work in a very short space of time.
Maybe we can finally ditch those time stamps and timesheets too.
Fast forward 2 years and as a management consultant, not having to clock in or out felt very grown up. Instead, our contributions at work were assessed via that staple of professional service firms, the timesheet. We had to account for every minute of our working day in 6 minute increments, logging these to various time codes. One of the biggest time drains of my early consulting career was the time I spent trying to figure out the right code to charge my time to. Part art, part science, this baffling activity merited a timecode to itself. Sometimes submitting a well-crafted timesheet seemed at least as important as delivering good quality work.
I quickly learned the unspoken truth that there were ‘good’ time codes to use and other time codes to avoid. Billable codes (for client work) trumped all others. But if you weren’t 100% resourced on a project, caution was needed. The ‘admin’ time code could squash any promotion chances if it appeared too often on your timesheet. Far better to demonstrate that your time had been busily devoted to the more purposeful-sounding ‘marketing’ time code or better still, to the loftier timecode for ‘developing new intellectual capital’. Selecting time codes that would send the right signals about my contributions and ambitions honed my resourcefulness and creativity in my early career.
Old habits, new life
After accounting for my time on a daily basis at work for 17 years, this proved a hard habit to break. As a new mother, I enthusiastically embraced Gina Ford’s structured (and divisive) approach to looking after our daughter. I happily wrote out Gina’s daily routines broken down into 15 minute segments and stuck to these religiously. Our daughter thrived and we stayed sane (just). I loved the order that the routines brought to the chaos of those early months. As well as creating space for me to breathe, they enabled me to carve out small chunks of time when I could resume my professional identity and do some freelance work.
Fridges and frogs.
When I returned to work more fully, running professional networks in London, my experience of time changed again. I discovered that surreal phenomenon whereby child-free time ticks by twice as fast as time spent with your child(ren). “Seriously? Pick-up time already?” With this new two-speed time, success meant completing the most important tasks in the short fragments of time between daily travel, calls and meetings. Without being seduced by more urgent or easier tasks. Or knocks on the door. Or our fridge contents.
‘Eating the frog’ is an expression usually attributed to Mark Twain which advocates doing the most important and hardest task(s) first thing in our working day. This is far better for our cognitive functioning and our daily productivity than deferring it until later in the day or tomorrow. I’ve found it tough to stick to but like going out for a run in bad weather, I bask in my sense of achievement (and the warm glow of self-virtue) afterwards.
A new direction.
Reflecting back on the many organisations I've worked in and with, I’ve become fascinated by our attitudes and habits in relation to our time at work. Why are our working hours so much longer than in other European nations and yet our productivity is so much lower? Why are we fixated on measuring time as an input instead of valuing what we actually achieve? What drives our collective frenzy of cramming ever-increasing amounts of activity into our working hours? Surely there’s a better way of managing our time. Exploring these questions has led me, to my surprise, into a new career chapter.
I’m researching and writing a business book titled The Future of Time. In it, I’m explaining how our culture of time at work needs to change. We can find better ways of designing organisations and collectively managing our time that enable us to be more productive, make the most of our diverse talents and live healthier, happier work lives. It’s a complex challenge with no single, quick solution. But it’s achievable. Covid 19 has already proved that we can radically transform the way we work in a very short space of time.
Maybe we can finally ditch those time stamps and timesheets too.
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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.
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