Ask Christa! How Can We Manage Time If We Have No Control of Time? (S2E21)

Hi everyone and welcome to Ask Christa! the place where you can ask questions about how to work through business challenges and workplace issues. I'm Christa Dhimo and today’s question is, “Time management has been an important topic for me as I juggle so many things and sometimes I struggle to keep up with everything. There are tons of articles and books written on managing time but recently someone told me you can't manage time because you can't control it. I thought about that and it makes sense. What is your perspective?”

That’s an interesting concept, and I often recommend we all beware of advice that’s an opinion offered as fact. I appreciate this listener asking for my perspective—and for starters, I don’t take a position that you can only manage something if you control it. Managing something isn’t always the same as controlling it. 

Sure, in the English language we talk about controlling our emotions—but that doesn’t mean we’re actually managing them. In fact, when we have to manage them the most, we are managing them because we have or feel we are not in a position to control them very well.

For example, if we’re in a library or in the audience of a serious panel discussion and something funny happens, we can hopefully control an OUTBURST of laughter, but after we spend the energy avoiding an outburst, we then usually have to take the next several minutes to manage the urge to… laugh. 

And if something’s funny enough, it’s nearly impossible to NOT laugh, which would be the ultimate control, but we can certainly manage it well enough until we leave the library or get through the serious panel discussion. At least, that’s what we try to do.

And so, my perspective is this: for starters, let’s not couple-up the concept of managing time with controlling time. Let’s not put yet one more constraint on what we ALL struggle with at different times in our lives: fitting it all in.

The fact that we constrain our time as much as we do is in part why we struggle with time management, and what I’ve seen the most is how many people disregard the need for rest, for staring out a window and giving your brain a work-break. 

Now, I AGREE with this listener in that there are “tons of articles and books written on managing time,” and that alone should signal to all of us that no one has figured out an equation that works for everyone. And a big part of that is how everyone’s perception of time is different. Some live by routines and strict schedules, and that’s how they fit everything in. Others take a breezier approach, with a beginning and an end to work and balanced life, and live a less structured life in between those parameters. And others take a more hybrid approach: strict structure when needed, easy-breezy when possible.

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to time management.

A big part of that is this: Time is a human construct, and I talk about this a lot. Time as a means of measuring our days and our nights was created by humans. 

Of course, Nature has schedules, meaning that some plants follow the sun throughout the day, some animals are only active at night. That’s more about a schedule for thriving. 

You know what else is a human construct? Control. And most humans believe that if we control something, especially if we learn to control it really well, then we've mastered it—and by mastering it, we are better able to manage it. 

Except, that just isn’t true for everything. Beware of advice that’s an opinion offered as fact.

Going back to the example about laughter—YES, if we learn to control an outburst, then we might master our ability to, as the saying goes, “keep a straight face.” We’ve all seen comedic actors do this. 

One of the best is Melissa McCarthy, whose improve during movies famously breaks her fellow actors (perhaps the best example is a well-known outtake from the 2012 movie This is 40 where the three main characters are sitting in a principal’s office and she begins to improv, and her co-starts, Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann can’t keep a straight face—by the way, shout out to the actress playing the principal, Joann Baron, who also kept a straight face). You’ll have to look it up. The improve scene has some saucy language in it, so I’m going to keep it out of my show notes, but… it is a master class on mastering emotion.

And that’s perhaps one of the few times having CONTROL over something has a direct line to how well you manage it. With enough skill and practice, we can control our emotions, and that is in large part how we manage them.

But emotions happen within us and as a response to what’s going on inside of us or our response to what’s going on outside of us. 

That’s not time. Time is a human construct—it’s built around the concept of splitting up and organizing the days and nights. It also enables us to organize various aspects of our days while also relating to each other with some common structure, norms, even contributions to society. For example, in some communities you cannot start loud construction work before 7am or 8am. In other communities, especially towns and cities with a lot of on-road commuters, paving is only done between 8pm and 5am.

When those situations are well known, we are better able to manage our days and our nights.

But as a construct, I’m not sure we’re required to CONTROL time in order to improve our management of it. 

That’s… my perspective.

Now, if you’re wondering, “So what does it all mean, Christa, how can we better manage our time—whether we can control it or not?”

My first answer is: lose the need to feel you must control time in order to manage it. There’s just too much about time we have NO control over.

Second, make friends with time. Resist the urge to feel like time is something that’s against you, that it ruins your day because there’s never enough of it, that it pushes you to use up every inch of sunlight and then all the hours before you go to bed. 

Time doesn’t do that to us, we do it to ourselves.

So make friends with time and take a step back. Acknowledge that it’s a human construct, and as such, while “time’s a ticking” (as the saying goes), and “time goes on” (also as the saying goes), we have a lot more control over what we do with our time than we think.

So after losing the need to feel you must be able to control time to manage time, and after making friends with time, start using it to your advantage. Now, because there is so much available in terms of time management, I’m not going to go into various time management techniques. Remember: everyone feels differently about time, so you have to find what will work best for you, 

But here are a few common tips about time management:

·       Where do you feel the most squeezed? Where do you feel the least comfortable about how you spend your time? Those aspects of your life are worth looking at. Chances are it’s in obligation to others—when you feel you must “spend” your time not where you want to spend your time, but where you feel you HAVE to spend your time. This could be in your personal life or your professional life. Wherever it is, you probably feel that it’s not the best use of your time, so see if you can change some of those obligations—drop some of them, reassign them, or put a timeline to it for when you will make some change.

·       Open up space in your days to get things done that are important to you—and this could be resting your brain, sitting in a silent room, playing a brain game, or any other use of time that feels useful to you—time well spent. Depending on where you are in your life and the habits you’ve formed about time and time management, this could be a challenging transition: from using your time where you think it SHOULD go over to using your time where you WANT it to go.

·       Last, if you’re going to read articles and books about time management, make sure it’s the right one for you. If you’re a working parent with children who have a lot of extracurricular activities: sports, music, various clubs, and you’re the one driving them to and from, a lot of your afternoons will be going toward others. There’s a timeline to that, it’s not forever, but look for the articles that focus on working parents or guardians with kids who have busy schedules. Stay clear from a book written by someone who has no kids, or who has someone taking care of their children, telling you how to manage your time. They probably have great ideas, but it’s not compatible with your life, so isn’t going to help. AT. ALL. In fact, it might do the opposite as you feel inadequate in being disciplined enough to get up at 5am for a workout at the gym when you’re already up at 6am to get the household going.

For your resources, I’ve included a page from Fiveable about Human Constructs so you can start to see time for what it is. If you’re not familiar with Fiveable, it’s a social platform focused on learning how to test and improve for high school students studying for Advanced Placement courses. It’s a pretty cool site.

I’ve also included a peer-reviewed paper coming out of PLOS One, listed on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central called, “Does time management work? A meta-analysis,” by Aeon, Faber, and Panaccio from 2021. It’s a great read—some areas are a bit technical, but the conclusion was that overall, effective time management serves as a booster well-being and life satisfaction more than a booster for work performance. I recommend reading the Introduction, which starts with a funny quote from the late and sharply observant George Carlin. I would also read the next section, “What does it mean to say that time management works?”

You are welcome to go through the methods and results from the analysis, but I’d jump to the discussion and conclusion sections, and you’ll get great information. I wish studies like these were amplified and applied more often, especially with how many “Time Management” experts there seem to be out there.

The third resource is from Harvard Business Review—and remember, you can sign up for a free account. I frequently offer sources from HBR or HBS because the articles are based on research, are application and practical, and are very relevant. This article is called “Time management is about more than life hacks,” and THANK YOU HBR for putting that out there. The article was published in 2020 and still holds true. There are various tips and tricks, but the article also offers insights to how people feel about time and what actually works for the majority of people looking to get a hold of their time management skills. 

OK, there it is, Episode 21. That was a great question—I enjoy talking through the more philosophical and life-focused questions, so I encourage you to submit any questions you’d like related to business and the workplace. You can go to my show’s website, AskChrista.com, that’s Christa with a C-H, review my episodes based on a category of interest or the latest ones in Season 2 that focuses a lot on workplace dynamics and more personal asks, such as this one.

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I appreciate your support. Thank you. And remember, if you have a business challenge or a workplace issue—Ask Christa!