Everybody thinks they’re working hard-yet most people actually only use 60% or less of their available work time. In a Microsoft study done in 2005, more than 38,000 people in 200 countries were asked about their individual productivity. It turned out that though they were arriving at work five days a week, they were only usefully using three days.

The curious thing about this wasted time is that people have worried about productivity for centuries, creating an endless stream of time management advice. As of May 2007, there were 270 time management books available on Amazon.com and yet not only do good time habits remain elusive, up to 20% of the population are chronic procrastinators.

Clearly, modern life throws up more distractions and demands than ever before. Even so, people exacerbate the problem because of the way they interpret time. Although time-related problems can be difficult to conquer, there are some tried-and-tested time management techniques that can offer a way out of the maze.

The Importance of Time

The phrase “time management” is a misnomer, because no matter how efficient you are, you can’t turn three minutes into six. Still, the way you think about time is a good indicator of how effective you are at controlling it. When Grohler and Myburgh (2001) studied a group of more than 1400 South African school children, they discovered that the higher achievers were more future-orientated and more conscientious in their time management and less focused on the present than the lower achievers.

This supports traditional advice: be diligent in the present while focusing on what you want to achieve in the future. However, the flourishing time management industry suggests that this seemingly simple idea may be too difficult for many people. We even have a name for the problem—we are “time poor,” meaning we feel unable to cope with all the demands placed upon us in the time we have available.

Yet it turns out the lack of available time to achieve a task is rarely the problem: It’s how we calculate time, with most people wildly over- and underestimating how long a task will take. According to Diana DeLonzor, the author of Never Be Late Again, people who are chronically late underestimate time by up to 30%. “Late people engage in magical thinking,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “They remember that day ten years ago when they made it to work in seven minutes flat. That becomes their standard.”

The opposite of this problem is best summed up by what is now known as Parkinson’s Law: “that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

There may be a biological reason for this, as our perception of time is tied up in how stimulated we are. If we are under stress, we perceive ourselves as being squeezed by the clock, even though time itself has not changed. In the same way, time drags when we are understimulated. I know this only too well: I always thought that the only thing keeping me from writing a book was my lack of free time. Five years ago, I took six months off and started writing.

It was the worst six months of my life. Every morning I would get up, determined to wrestle the writing demon, and every day I would go to bed with nothing done, despite having stayed at my desk from the moment I got up until late at night. The problem wasn’t motivation—otherwise I couldn’t have saved enough money for the enterprise—but the phone calls, Internet and occasional piece of freelance, which seemingly conspired against me.

What changed things was a trip to an industrial psychologist. The first thing she did was make me keep a time log of everything I did for every half hour of every day, for a week– even though some productivity experts suggest 15 minutes as a better unit of time to track. One tip is to set a timer to go off every 15 minutes, to remind you to write down what you’ve just been doing. As B. Eugene Griessman, author of Time Tactics of Very Successful People, once wrote: “A log doesn’t leave much room for self delusion.”

My log showed me just how bad my time perception was. Those freelance jobs I agreed to do in one day actually needed three, so I was chronically stressed. Those days set aside for working on my book, on the other hand, were used to catch up on sleep or to procrastinate. The solution to the former was to multiply my “time estimates” by three, while the solution to the latter problem was to reduce the time available to work. By giving myself an open-ended work day, I lost focus.

Another problem was that my time structures were not being reinforced by my environment. Just as people who live in solitary confinement lose all sense of time, so my own time perceptions were being eroded because I was alone. I fixed this problem by moving into a shared office space where everybody kept regular hours. Within two years, I had a thriving freelance business and two published books.

Another tip the industrial psychologist gave me was to plan the day by reviewing what needed to be done each night and writing a to-do list for the next day. This works so long as you don’t overload the list with things to do and get discouraged when you see that the list still hasn’t been ticked off by the end of the day. Eight to-do items is probably a realistic number, assuming that some of them are small tasks.

Efficiency Versus Effectiveness

For much of the twentieth century, time management advice was based on the ideal of efficiency. Thanks to the work of earlier experts such as F.W. Taylor, business advice was aimed at enabling employees to get through their work in a more streamlined and mechanical way. However, by the middle of the last century, thinkers such as the management consultant/writer Peter Drucker were suggesting that there was more to running a well-oiled system than a human acting like a machine. Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” to describe a worker who molded abstract, intellectual property and needed an outlook and environment, plus a style of management that differed greatly from that found in the factories and assembly rooms.

With more knowledge workers in the workforce than ever before, businesses today need more than just more efficient employees, because in the 21st century, productivity involves more than just performing a set of tasks. It’s about harnessing an employee’s creative and intellectual contributions to further the business. In other words, to get ahead in business or work today, people need to be more effective, rather than just faster and more organised. This emphasis on quality as opposed to raw speed (or quantity) is reflected in the newer ideas on time management, which aim to make people see that one or two tasks done well can be much more satisfying and productive than planning a handful of tasks and completing none.

Get Things Done

Amazon.com’s bestselling time management book is David Allen’s Get Things Done (2001), whose guiding principle is that you can’t be effective if you’re worrying about unfinished business. His solution is to remove everything from the brain and place it in a reliable “external memory system.” Allen recommends taking two or three days to complete a full-life “audit” before making decisions about how you should handle each task, and then creating a system of regular review. “Make a list of everything that’s bugging you,” Allen told Whakate. “Most people create this huge emotional fog around stuff because they haven’t objectified it.”

Allen says simple lists are inadequate for the complexities of modern life. “If you want a clear head, you have to deal with everything in your head,” he says, explaining that the brain has no intrinsic concept of past or future, trying instead to process everything as it arises. If too many things are going on simultaneously, the brain shuts down. Allen says that once everything is out of your head, you can achieve clarity and serenity because you will no longer be in conflict with yourself.

Two researchers from the University of Brussels, Heylighen and Vidal (2007), tested his system and concluded that Allen’s method of getting people to change their environment—by creating external collection devices—actually changed the way the brain operated within that environment, leading to a virtuous circle of better task execution, more environmental changes and more productivity.

Get Everything Done

British time management expert Mark Forster believes that defining commitments is more important than defining tasks. Further, he argues that the classic tools of time management, the to-do list and prioritising, are counter-productive. “The approach I have is to use a ‘closed’ list rather than an open-ended one,” he says. “You have a list for the day and work to completion, so prioritising doesn’t come into it. You prioritise commitments, not tasks.”

Forster says the number one problem he sees is people taking on too much, without thinking through the implications. “If you write out a list of what to do, it just gets longer and longer,” he says. “Look around the environment you’re in right now – you could probably find 100 things to add to a to-do list.” But, he says, if you get overwhelmed, you will literally do nothing. Forster also agrees that people generally underestimate how long things take because they don’t calculate the total time commitment needed for a task. “If you agree to take an honorary position that’s “just” two meetings a year, it doesn’t sound like much. But you need to factor in traveling time, reading time and all the sub-committees,” he says. “Those two meetings are a considerable commitment.”

Be Ruthless

The idea of restricting yourself only to what is necessary can be seen at its most extreme—and improbable—in Tim Ferris’s bestselling book of the moment, The 4-Hour Work Week. He argues that the secret to a stress-free life is to use the Pareto Principle, which states that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. Ferris believes you should identify your most important 20% and either dump everything else or outsource it elsewhere (meaning not that some of the work will go away– just that it will be done by somebody else who doesn’t have the right to say “no”). And what does Ferris recommend doing with all your new-found free time? Care-free traveling, of course.

Ferris is advocating an extreme viewpoint, which explicitly equates time with money, but most people do not have enough autonomy in either their workplace or their daily lives to be able to drop everything and go sailing. In any case, work itself can be one of the things that makes life meaningful, especially when it harnesses ability and creativity in a productive way. To achieve that, what is required is not more to-do lists, but a better understanding of time and how we use it.

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