Have the time of your life

Helen Kirwan-Taylor10 April 2012

In the past, I have learned many things from cabbies, those gurus of the road, but one particular taxi driver recently has had a lasting effect on my life. I was in Paris, on my way to the Gard du Nord to catch the Eurostar to London where I had an important deadline to meet. I jumped into a taxi and we set off. Suddenly, I realised I had left my computer with all my work on it at the front desk of the Hôtel Costes. I shrieked at the driver to do a U-turn. He looked at me in the rear-view mirror and said, 'I used to be like you.' For a crazed instant, I thought he was telling me he'd had a sex change, then I noticed the classical music on the car stereo, the leatherbound books on the passenger seat and the tweed ensemble he was wearing. The man, and his vehicle, emanated calm.

This buddha asked me why I was so tense and I explained the deadline, that I had to get back to London to my sister's wedding dress fitting, the snow was getting worse... and then I finished with 'I really don't have time for this'. Without turning round, he instructed, 'Substitute the word "life" for the word "time".' 'I don't have life for this?' I said, realising how strange it sounded.

And while delivering me to the Eurostar in plenty of time for my return train, he introduced me to a new idea. Its Yoda is time-management consultant Alan Lakein, who said: 'Time=life, therefore, waste your time and waste your life, or master your time and master your life.' My cabbie had previously been an executive with a large company. After taking a time-management course at the behest of his firm, he quit his job and went to work on his own account. 'I realised I was filling time, not living,' he explained simply. His biggest time-saving tip was: 'Plan your day. First thing in the morning decide what you want to accomplish and write it down.' He didn't mean 'to do' lists: he was talking 'goals'.

In the past, time-management experts used graphs and PDFs to illustrate their points. They behaved as though humans were robots, to be programmed to think and act in 20 to 30-minute intervals. One time-saving tip I read was: 'Don't chat with colleagues by the water cooler,' instead, march straight back to your office and continue ticking off lists. Nothing in their planning acknowledged that 'chat' is essential to find out what is really going on in any business, or indeed any life. It's in the lulls between events that you learn things. As any mother will tell you, it's while you're stuck in traffic and drumming your fingers on the wheel that your child suddenly admits to being bullied at school. The same applies to office politics and to work.

Tim Ferriss, an entrepreneur who wrote The 4-Hour Work Week, and his new time-management cohorts now argue that most work is mechanical time-serving and taking more time does not generally get you better results. He swears by Parkinson's Law, the old saw that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Their theories have provoked a new way of looking at time (or, if you prefer, life) as, rather oddly, a pickle jar. Think of a jar. Then try putting in objects the size of a golf ball, say. Even when it's filled with all the balls it can hold, it will not be quite full, so you slip in some marbles and give it a shake. The golf balls will rearrange themselves and let the marbles slip down. There's still a little space near the top. So throw in some sand and shake again. There's still some air in there, so now add water and it's full to the brim. The pickle jar is your life. The golf balls represent goals and commitments that are important such as, say, your marriage, job and children. The marbles are goals that might never be realised but they still matter, such as mastering an instrument or getting a PhD. As for the sand, this is the 'to do' list stuff that robs us of our time: emails, dinner-party planning, car maintenance. Water is time spent doing utterly irrelevant things such as watching reruns of Peep Show or matching up socks. Most of us have things we really want to do (take up yoga, plan an adventure abroad, write a book) but postpone until tomorrow because we get distracted by an easier task such as flicking the remote control.

Mark Barnes, an associate at Ashridge Business School in Hertfordshire and author of Time to Think: Seize Control of Your Time and Your Life, agrees that the key to managing time is to define your goals: 'If you want to be the greatest father in the world then you're not likely to be a multimillionaire, too.' He also warns that you should work out your approach to those goals: 'For some people trying really hard at most things is important; for others it's about being very good at just one thing.' According to Barnes, first you should decide who you are and what matters to you most, then fit the rest in. 'The most effective people go to work with a plan. They don't just turn on the computer and respond,' he says. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't and a towering figure in business coaching, hardly ever works past 6pm. His theory is simple: write 'a stop-doing' list. Collins decided to focus on writing and rid his jar of the sand and water. He calls it a Fixed Schedule Effect and it relies on discipline. You must cull tasks and appointments from your routine and 'risk mildly annoying or upsetting people in exchange for your time'. Collins says, 'I don't have sanctimonious auto-responders on my email, I just do what I do and people adapt.' To get there, he simplified his lifestyle. Some people I know complicate theirs with two homes, children in different schools and charity committees, and then wonder why everything they do is half-baked.

However, many people strapped for time are just trying to hold it together, not run multinational corporations. They would love to have a life full of just golf balls but at best they have a few marbles and then rolling dunes of sand. Collins advises us to use the 'time/life' swap: 'I don't have life to see my friends' sounds depressing, but 'I don't have life to bake organic carrot cupcakes' sounds sensible. As childbirth guru Christine Hill said, 'The best mothers are slobs.' I spent far more time Cillit-Banging the kitchen counters than talking to my sons when they were little.

After my Paris taxi encounter, I made a chart of my own. I had two categories of goal: long- and short-term and included everything from friends to work, family to fitness. It was an eye-opener. I realised that going to the gym may look like a short-term goal but ultimately it needed a big slice of my time as my future health (life) will rest largely on what I invest now.

What I had failed to do in Paris was 'plan'. Time-management experts all agree on one truth: if you leave things to chance, chance wins. Chaos fills time and, in my case, runs up cab fares. Wake up earlier; pack the night before; assume snow means delays – do not give yourself ten minutes to cross town in the rush hour; write things down in your diary the moment they come up.

The point of time management is not just to improve efficiency but to avoid disappointment and regret. Working backwards (pretending you're 80) is a great way to remind yourself why being glued to Facebook or Net-a-porter is not likely to result in health, happiness – or an exciting obituary for that matter.

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