Time management

Three strategies to improve time management in the office

Many workers feel overwhelmed by limited time, but traditional time management techniques are often not enough. Here are three less considered factors to transform the way we organise our working day

by Lorenzo Cavalieri*

15 January 2026

Un buon capo si mette in ascolto

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

One of the common aspects of the everyday life of employees and managers in every sector is the perception of having little time to do everything one could/should do: 'I should do more, but there is no time', 'I am overloaded, I don't have a minute to breathe'.

When one feels the feeling of 'time asphyxiation' in the office, a vicious circle is usually triggered because clearing one's schedule through good planning is a time-consuming activity: if I don't have time to 'take care of myself', I have less and less time.

The other perverse aspect of this problem is that in the blizzard of a thousand daily tasks we tend to privilege the dimension of urgency over that of strategic. We give priority to what cannot be postponed, forgetting that often the activities that cannot be postponed (the delivery of a document by a certain deadline for example) are in perspective less important than strategic activities that unfortunately under pressure we end up postponing all the time (the Chinese lesson for an export manager working with the Chinese market or the chat at the bar with the problematic collaborator).

In the lessons of time management a lot of emphasis is placed on the concepts of delegation and scheduling. Ways of offloading part of one's tasks/activities onto someone else or onto technology are studied. They also try to convey the culture of good planning and strict adherence to and uncompromising defence of agendas/timetables/commitments. There are, however, three much underestimated areas of reflection that form the necessary corollary to what is learnt in time management training courses. Without this awareness, time management techniques lose their effectiveness:

1) Each of us, without realising it, decides every day to prioritise the activities that gratify us most. Even those of us who are fortunate enough to do the 'dream job' on a daily basis actually face a set of 'micro-activities'. Not all 'micro-activities' like or gratify in the same way. So we unwittingly end up spending more time than we should on our favourite 'micro-activities', inevitably neglecting others and ending the day in oxygen debt. In order to manage time well, it is therefore essential to be able to unpack one's work and be aware that the time we devote to what we like best is fatally out of proportion to our real needs. If we devote more than 20 per cent of our time to our favourite 'micro-activity', we are probably not working well.

2) We tend to assign a 'time budget' to individual activities and never question it. If in our head an email explanation to the customer 'cubes' twenty minutes, we always end up taking twenty minutes even when with the help of technology or the development of our skills we would only have the margins to take fifteen minutes. It is the same principle (so-called Parkinson's law) that if we are given two hours for a maths task we tend to hand in exactly two hours later. Commitment and concentration decrease if we are early, increase if we are late. We try to challenge our 'time budgets'. For example, are we sure that we really need 30 minutes for the Monday update meeting?

3) The easiest way to free up time from our daily schedule is to 'steal' time from others by negotiating in our favour. We tend to passively accept or fail to notice all the deadlines that others impose on our lives even when they could be challenged: "Can you send it to me by the weekend? It's very urgent." This request is sometimes a strict, unbreakable prescription from the big boss, but more often it is the request of a colleague or customer that can be critically examined and become the subject of a mini-negotiation. It is not necessarily the case that the urgency communicated to us by others is a reflection of an objective fact. In this sense, the best possible time management course is actually a course in negotiation.

*Managing director of the training and consulting company Sparring