In our latest run of IsoLabs, a group of Isometric colleagues chose to come together to improve their time management.
The challenges were familiar in a startup environment.
Many of our processes and social contracts are predicated on availability. For instance, many members of the Isometric team aim to respond to urgent requests in real time—which necessitates an almost continual scanning of tools like Slack and Gmail.
Likewise, a truism of startup life is that there’s always more to do than time available. When that’s combined with a passionate, values-driven team, the risk of working to excess (by which I mean to a point where wellbeing is affected, or where long-term sustainability starts to be called into question) is very present.
As a result, I thought the kinds of things we would look at were tools and techniques. I expected we might explore methods for managing time effectively, for example time blocking, the Eisenhower Matrix, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for managing expectations. I also thought we might talk about self-management and the bird’s-eye view of wellbeing (tools I like include the stress bucket, SHED, and the wheel of life).
And while we did discuss some of that, and some of it might have helped, what I have really reflected on is the extent to which questions of time management are really questions of identity and self-esteem.
Let me back up.
What I’m trying to say is our identities—how we actually show up in this world and what impact we’re able to have in it—are in huge part an outcome of how we choose to spend our time.
To occupy the identity of “a helpful colleague,” we might choose to spend part of our day pair-coding with someone and giving them the benefit of our experience. We might jump into a supplier issue which—if not strictly in our job description—is nonetheless something we could influence positively. We might monitor Slack continually, responding immediately to queries. We might grab lunch for a teammate who’s stuck in a meeting.
And with all of that accomplished, our identity is secure. We are what we do.
This means in turn that, to improve “time management”, often what’s needed is a deep and wide-ranging discussion about how we understand ourselves as human beings. We must reflect on what makes us feel valuable—and what, if we’re honest, actually allows us to create value for the systems in which we operate (those two are often not the same).
Articulated another way, to fix our relationship with a broken task management system, we must first fix our relationship with a broken sense of purpose. We must zoom all the way out and ask the question: what do I want my impact to be in this job/ team/ world? And how do I then make decisions on a day-to-day basis that fit with that intention?
For many people, a path forward is offered by unpicking the stories we tell ourselves and testing whether they’re true and useful (see Nancy Kline’s brilliant book More Time to Think for a longer explanation of this methodology). For instance, many people who struggle with time management tell themselves that “if I don’t reply immediately, my colleagues will think I’m bad at my job.” That’s clearly unhelpful, and is actually at the root of many other self-destructive behaviours.
We can then consider what would be more true, and more helpful. For instance, a thought like “I’m most valuable to this team when I deliver the long-term, meaty work that Slack risks distracting me from” would clearly output a different set of choices about which tasks to work on.
To summarize then, this quarter, I thought I was running a learning group about time management. In fact, I’ve learned from my wonderful colleagues that I've been running one about how each of us understands our value in this world.
The conversations that have resulted have been fascinating! And I’ll never think about time management the same way again.
