A matter of time

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…”

Rudyard Kipling might have written ‘If’ in 1895 but our relationship with time was no less complicated. It is, of course, one of the few things left in the world that we can’t control although that doesn’t stop us trying to manipulate and own it.

I was writing a blog last week for a client. She runs a business that coaches leaders and teams and the blog involved researching burnout. I was surprised to discover that time - or at least our perception of it - is a fundamental factor. In fact, the ‘pervasive sense of time scarcity’ is given as the number one reason that 71% of leaders report a significant rise in stress, with 40% considering leaving their role.

Kipling’s comment about using every seconds might be central here - I feel as though we are now expected to at least double that if we are to feel worthy and relevant in our work.

Time has been in my thoughts for other reasons this week because I’m preparing a talk for a business expo in Oxford and it’s on the topic of content creation and AI. For many businesses, satisfying the social media feeds is a huge drain on time, especially as it’s not core to client delivery. AI, therefore, has become a go-to tool to speed things up. It does this to great effect but my argument for needing a balance between ‘brain and bot’ is that handing creativity over to the machines means you lose something in originality, authenticity, and quality.

Automations and digital tools exacerbate the feeling that we should be doing more with less. The problem is, rather than saving time and enabling people to get a better balance in life, we’re saving time then reducing headcount and expecting the remaining workforce to maintain productivity. We can’t let go of that preconceived idea that our output is the ultimate measure of success so we simply load more work into the system rather than taking the benefits afforded by things like AI and automation.

These scenarios all take me back to the concept of the Triple Constraint - also known as the Project Management triangle - where the three interdependent constraints are time, cost and quality (or scope).

Automation is making this triangle more dynamic but that brings risks.

AI can compress timescales, reduce labour costs and rework, improve quality by reducing human error, and enhance decision making with better data insights. But with speed comes a question mark over depth and therefore trust. From the perspective of the workforce, faster cycles can give rise to an ‘always on’ feeling which brings us back to the burnout stats I shared at the start of this article.

Our obsession with time extends far beyond the workplace. I was at a 50th birthday party recently and a few of us were trying to decide which is the ‘best’ decade. We almost universally agreed life got better with age but those in their 50s were surprised that it ‘wasn’t as old as they’d thought’. Perhaps life is kinder than it was to previous generations but we certainly all felt younger than our parents probably had at our age.

However, we are more obsessed with time and we seem to have less of it. It’s back to that perception again - the more we want to do, the less tine we feel is available. The faster we can achieve things, the more we want to get out of life.

And don’t even get me started on how that affects decision making. What things have you not done because you feel time has passed you by? When have you played safe because you didn’t feel there was time to do a proper job on something? Are you of the opinion that you can’t start a new job or hobby because of your age?

I’ll leave you with the concept of Oliver Burkeman’s book, 4,000 Weeks (I’d suggest not reading if you’re of a time-sensitive disposition!): humans make themselves miserable by mistakenly believing they should be able to get through all their tasks, to-dos and chores in the time they’ve allotted them. Humans will never have perfect control over how they spend their time.

With that in mind, surely it’s best to do what makes us happy, do it well, and do it while being fully present?

Easy to say. Perhaps Kipling would agree that this approach would bring us ‘the earth and everything that’s in it’.