One of my passions is educating people on time and project management. I wrote this article to show that life has its hurdles...

The 5th season of the TV sitcom, Seinfeld, features the episode, The Stall, wherein Elaine is in a movie theater bathroom and asks a woman next to her to pass some toilet paper. All you can see on the screen are the stalls and their feet. The woman (who later turns out to be Jerry’s girlfriend) guardedly turns her feet away from Elaine (implying displeasure) and replies, “no, I’m sorry. I can’t spare it. There is not enough to spare.” Elaine pleads with her, “just 3 squares will do it,” to which the woman replies, ‘I don’t have 3 squares. I don’t have a square to spare... I can’t spare a square!” Absurd, insane and silly, but not so if we examine this scenario with toilet paper being a metaphor for TIME – individual time that we each choose to give or not give away.

I recently ran my own little experiment to determine aptitude of individuals to spare 5 minutes of their time, my hypothesis being: even the easiest of task being requested is viewed as too burdensome, onerous on one’s time and ends up going ignored. I sent a simple, rather mindless, request to 200 people: read a 1-2 page article, go online and add a one-sentence comment about it, and then pass it along to one other person to do the same 5 minute process. In an ideal world, this should have produced endless commentary. (Think the tag-line from an old shampoo commercial, “And they’ll tell two friends… and so on… and so on.) Instead, here are the results:
• 19 people responded; that represents a response rate of 9.5% for the original 200 recipients and under 5% if the pool was doubled by the task of forwarding the request to one person.
• 2 of these 19 people were men; that is, 11% of the respondents were male.

Surprised at such a low response rate? I am not. It is completely what I anticipated, proof positive that people in today’s world – whether you work full-time, work part-time, don’t work, raise a family, take care of an elder or simply have no responsibilities – do not have the time AND energy to deal with all the information gathering, data collection, knowledge sharing. Of course, we all know this and it is understood that this phenomenon directly correlates to our advancements in technology and the demands for “just-in-time” analysis and results. It seems that so much of what we do these days centers around a pull-program for additional, updated, revised data or a push-system that sits in its lofty space requiring you to remember to go online and check regularly. Simply, society is at its breaking point with information overload and it could be backfiring on company performance.

The Families and Work Institute wrote in Overwork in America: When the Way We Work Becomes Too Much, “there is little question that the way Americans work and live has changed in recent years. The fast-paced, global 24/7 economy, the pressures of competition, and technology have blurred the traditional boundaries between work life and home life. Furthermore, this new economy calls for new skills—skills like responding quickly to competing demands and jumping from task to task. In response, the topic of being overworked has become a hot subject of discussion in workplaces, in the media, in medical journals, and in homes.” The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health reported almost a decade ago that stress is a threat to the health of employees and the World Health Organization reports that by the year 2020 clinical depression will outweigh cancer and follow heart disease as the second cause of disability and death globally.

Corporations need to pay attention to this part: medical costs associated with health conditions related to stress and depression affect financial performance as companies bear greater self-insurance / retentions on corporate medical policies. Research from momentum2execution.com cites, “$300 billion, or $7,500 per employee, is spent annually in the U.S. on stress-related compensation claims, reduced productivity, absenteeism, health insurance costs, direct medical expenses (nearly 50% higher for workers who report stress), and employee turnover.”

In addition, the more overworked the employees, the more they are likely to make mistakes, costly from at least the standpoint of creating double work and inefficiency, let alone the mistake itself. Employees are also more likely to experience more anger and frustration towards their colleagues and supervisors, resenting people making requests and people they perceive as not working as hard. Companies can not afford this kind of inefficiency and counter-productive tendencies. Chief Economist, Bart van Ark, writes in June 2008 for The Conference Board’s, Productivity Can Help Pull Economies Through a Slowdown that in these times of economic downturn, there is a very delicate balance between pinching the pennies at the expense of overall production potential. Institutions invest in people and systems and marry the two in hopes of a union of ultimate efficiencies. Employees are asked to gather, collate, analyze, revise, update, input, output, renew, amend, augment systems that are meant to actually make individuals’ lives easier and make us all more productive by narrowing our scope of deliverables through understanding where output is best served. Have we gotten off-balance by relying too heavily on systems?

While we can’t turn back the clock to simpler times and individually we aren’t able to change how culture evolves and the demands on us in this world of global connectivity, we can control how we deal, cope, prioritize and balance our activities to maximize our own efficiency and productivity and accuracy on the job. “Sparing a square” should not be so ominous. Here are some tips gathered through years of research on time management:
1. Take your vacation time. It is given to each individual as part of the comp package. As of 2004, a third of the US population did not intend to take their full vacation time. Leaving vacation days on the table is equivalent to losing some of your money. Still further, I’ll be so bold as to suggest that you minimize work while on vacation. Replenishing yourself, refueling your battery are directly correlated to better performance. In fact, 55% of employees who often work on vacation fall in the classification of being overworked, as stated in Overwork in America. Of those taking vacation, the average amount of days it takes to relax is 2, but research indicates that more than 7 days of vacation are associated with better psychological outcome, despite assumptions that work “piling up” causes more anxiety and less vacation satisfaction.
2. Learn how to pace yourself. Analyze the length of time it takes you to complete different assignments on your plate, whether it is a project that needs to be broken down into component parts, or a phone call to clarify a solution, or simply a meeting that includes a drive from the office and back. Then, schedule only half of your normal work day’s hours. Mapping out only 4-5 hour / day allows flexibility to handle the unexpected, the interruptions (estimated at 50 per day).
3. Have a system. Choose only one type of calendar program (book or electronic) and stick with it, recording all action items in this planner. Don’t rely on your memory. How horrible to have 100 different work thoughts running around in your head and worrying about remembering them the next day. We can only say one word here: insomnia. Write everything down, free up your mind to brainstorm and think proactively towards your work.
4. Avoid E.A.A.D.D – Email Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. Turn off the email notification pop-up window and plan a couple times in each day where you check emails. The Wall Street Journal cites that people receive on average 125 emails per day. You can’t afford to be interrupted and distracted each and every time one arrives.
5. Manage the paper: Read it then file it, Pass it on or throw it away. This is one area in particular where technology does actually improve efficiency; everything can be stored on a computer system. According to academic studies, 80% of paper should be in the throw away category. Otherwise, “paper clutters up the office, and clutter, by its nature, reduces efficiency. Furthermore, this is an area where technology actually works to our benefit. Save documents online (and be sure to back them up); not only does this create better organization for you but it is the “green” way to go. Good for our environment, good for our economy, and good for your soul.
6. Say “no”, appropriately. Say Jim Claitor and Colleen Contreras in their book, Build the Life You Want, “It is important to realize that time management is no longer about having the right tools and enough discipline. Rather, people today simply have more to do than time to do it. Time management skills involve being able to make tough choices about priorities and to feel at ease with those choices.”

It is important to understand that time is measured through a few dimensions, not just hours worked:
• how well you use the time you have in each given day, eg. your focus versus the interruptions and distractions that can tax the best of multi-taskers;
• how well you schedule your time, eg. ability to realistically map length of time it takes to deliver each activity (including basics such as commuting);
• and how many time-consuming activities are imposed on you, eg. more work being imposed on fewer resources in shorter “real time” deadlines.

Absent being the few that are born with organization skills, type-A, personalities everyone needs to think seriously about maintaining control over their workload, produce efficiencies, yield accurate results, and ultimately keep costs associated with errors and health risks at bay. Individually and collectively, we all stand to gain by prioritizing, understanding our limitations, managing the multi-dimensions of time and then getting to a point where we can “spare a square”.