Why Old Time Management Ideas May Not Work Today

Neither our standard education, nor traditional time management models, nor the piles of organizing tools available, such as personal notebook planners, Microsoft Outlook, or Palm personal digital assistants (PDAs), has given us a viable means of meeting the new demands placed on us.  If you've tried to use any of these processes or tools to aid in better time management, you've probably found them unable to accommodate the speed, complexity, and changing priority factors inherent in what you are doing.  The ability to be successful, relaxed, and in control during these fertile but turbulent times demands new ways of thinking and working.  There is a great need for new methods, technologies, and work habits to help us get on top of our world.

The traditional approaches to time management and personal organization were useful in their time.  They provided helpful reference points for a workforce that was just emerging from an industrial assembly line modality into a new kind of work that included choices about what to do and discretion about when to do it.  When "time" itself turned into a work factor, personal calendars became a key work tool.  (Even as late as the 1980s many professionals considered having a pocket Day-Timer the essence of being organized, and many people today think of their calendar as the central tool for being in control.)  Along with discretionary time also came the need to make good choices about what to do.  "ABC" priority codes and daily "to-do" lists were key techniques that people developed to help them sort through their choices in some meaningful way.  If you had the freedom to decide what to do, you also had the responsibility to make good choices, given your "priorities."

What you've probably discovered, at least at some level, is that a calendar, though important, can really effectively manage only a small portion of what you need to organize.  And daily to-do lists and simplified priority coding have proven inadequate to deal with the volume and variable nature of the average professional's workload.  More and more people's jobs are made up of dozens or even hundreds of e-mails a day, with no latitude left to ignore a single request, complaint, or order.  There are few people who can (or even should) expect to code everything an "A," a "B," or a "C" priority, or who can maintain some predetermined list of to-dos that the first telephone call or interruption from their boss won't totally undo.