Are You Using Time Differently In The Knowledge Economy?
The saying used to be
that “time is money,” with the thinking going that putting in more time will
guarantee good results. A common example of this is the 10,000 hour idea put
forth by Malcolm Gladwell and others. In short: if you want to master
something, you need 10,000 hours of repetition at it. This would directly tie
“time” (the hours) to “success” (mastery), but unfortunately,the 10,000 hour theory has been debunked by many.
Here’s a micro example: sometimes, a person
will study for days and days (time) for a test, then do poorly (no success) on the test. How is this possible?
It is because results and success have less to do with time, and more to do with how productively you’re using the
time — namely, how much attention you’re giving to receiving information and
applying it appropriately.
The history of time
In the then agriculture-driven economy, time management wasn’t so
important. Most people spent their days farming or tending to animals. Why
would anything really need to be tracked, per se?
Soon, the Industrial Revolution moved more
people off farms and into factories. Now there was a reason to track time. The
evolution of the 40 hour work week (around
the mid-1920s) made time a huge commodity. Time was,
essentially, the new money. To get paid your hourly wages (actual money), you
had to track time. Your value was quite literally tied to the hours you put in.
The current economy has been described often
as “The Knowledge Economy.” It’s much less about the number of hours put in
(although people still work a lot), and much more about the amount of knowledge
you can acquire and transform into something better
The problem: many management approaches still
are focused on the time side. Consider the idea of “seat time.” Most places in
the first world are WiFi-enabled, so many Knowledge Economy workers can work
from anywhere. They can access emails and files via the cloud. But lots of
bosses are obsessed with “seat time,” or seeing the employees physically in a
place near them. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s rooted in the “time is money”
economy.
Right now, many companies are focused more on
employees being in a specific place for a specific period of time, instead of
how to increase focus, energy, and delivery of high-impact tasks. And what’s
worse: the “time is money” attitude stresses
out employees majorly.
Manage
your energy and attention, not your time
For as long as we can predict, time will continue to tick on at the same
rate, but what actually fluctuates on a day-to-day basis is how
much energy and attention you have — in the
Knowledge Economy, that’s what makes or breaks how productive you are, and more
important, it’s something you can actually control.
Time is a necessity of work and of nature,
but as far as productivity is concerned, it should merely be the backdrop
against which you work.
Consider the sheer idea of the 9-to-5
workday. Today, when productivity is about what you accomplish and not how much
you produce, a nine-to-five workday makes as much sense as diligently tracking
your time out on the farm. After all, what if your Biological Prime Time falls
when you’re not working, and you have the most energy from 6 to 9 a.m., or from
7 to 11 p.m.? Or what if you have trouble focusing because you’re trying to
multitask on a million things at once? Or what if you’re constantly bombarded
by distractions and interruptions?
People — all workers — are different. And if
the goal is productive output, we need to understand and respect that.
When we schedule time for something, what
we’re actually doing is simply deciding when we will invest our attention and
energy into the task. That’s where time management should fit into the productivity
equation. Managing your time becomes important only after you understand how
much energy and focus you will have throughout the day and define what you want
to accomplish.
It’s much less about the time involved, and
much more about the output.
So
how can we work less and get more?
If your workplace has flexible working hours, make use of that. Have
enough rest and come in ready to work so that you are at your optimum
performance. During the day, take short breaks to disconnect. The optimal human ratio for work is 52 minutes on, 17
minutes off.
Schedule, but schedule differently: I
schedule my entire day, and I’ve found that doing so makes me incredibly
productive—especially when I form a strong intention about what I’m going to
get done. But I only ever plan out my day after I account for how much
attention and energy I will have, and most important, what I intend to
accomplish.
Consider
“focus days” where your entire focus is high-level,
big projects and new learning. Block your calendar out so no one can throw
meetings on it and stir up distractions.
Remember that the goal of the Knowledge
Economy is different from the goal of the initial Industrial Economy. Now your
time needs to be productive, not just a set amount of hours, so move towards
that.
Brian Lee
http://www.lifehack.org/645501/shifting-away-from-the-time-economy?ck_subscriber_id=168781672
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