How to prevent hyper-productivity from extinguishing enthusiasm for what we do

'Mmmm... Then in 2024 it can't be a classic time management course.'

"Exactly. If you show our colleagues the famous Eisenhower matrix, they laugh in your face."

"And they would do well."

"So you accept the challenge?"

"Deal'.

In order to reason about the inefficiency of classical time management systems, let us go back to the basics, starting with the famous mantra of the vase and the stones.

It was made known to the general public in 1994 by the populariser Stephen Covey: a teacher brings a couple of large stones, some gravel, a sandbag and a glass jar to class.

He then asks the students: "Are you able to fit everything into the pot?"

The students (who, forgive me for saying so, are clearly not lightning fast) start filling the pot with sand and gravel, discovering that the stones do not fit.

Whereupon, sporting a big patronising smile, the teacher reveals the solution: "First you have to put the stones, then the gravel and only at the end the sand, so that the smaller elements find space in the gaps between the larger ones."

The bottom line: if we prioritise the most important things, we will get everything done and keep room for the secondary ones. If we do not act this way, we will not be able to find time for the important things, and our life will become a quagmire of daily impatience. The end.

But is it really so?

Journalist Oliver Burkeman recently published an essay on the subject. Although the title suggests a didactic manual: "How do you get more time?", its pages are filled with philosophical musings, much candour and moderate common sense, rare in a US self-help text.

Actually, Burkeman explains, the teacher was clever: he only brought a couple of large stones with him, knowing that they would be in the pot.

"The crucial question is not how to distinguish important from unimportant activities, but what to do when too many things seem to be of equal value to us, when all these damn stones are big."

Most productivity experts offer techniques to keep believing that they can do more and more, that they can do it all. Yet productivity itself, for more and more people, is a trap. With disarming simplicity and speed, it can turn us into hyper-productivity for its own sake.

Burkeman again: 'Hyperefficiency only increases haste. Doing everything today does not mean that we will be free tomorrow. I don't know if there is anyone in the history of mankind who has ever achieved a perfect work-life balance, whatever that may be, and certainly not thanks to yet another list of 7 things to do that successful people do before 7".

In short, we are inundated with advice on how to optimise our lives, books with grand titles: How to be productive 4 hours a week and social pages full of Life Hack strategies to save precious seconds every day. The problem is not that these techniques don't work. They work just fine, but in depleting our souls and making us dry. When the goal becomes attending more meetings and developing more projects, the result is inevitably to feel anxious and empty.

The writer Marilynne Robinson also had her say recently, with a sentence that has stuck with me: 'For many people, the zeitgeist (beautiful German word meaning 'the spirit of the times') at work is a joyless urgency'.

So where do we (re)start to avoid dryness, and regain some legitimate joy, enjoyment and fun in what we do every day? A first clue might be this: the real goodness of a time management system is whether it is helping you not to do or choose, but to ignore the right things.

I will come back to this topic in the next instalment: we will deal with out-of-control calls, understanding how the first time thieves are often ourselves, and how we can turn ourselves into 'liberators of other people's time'.

* Partner & Head of Communication Newton Group