Why Time Management is not the best strategy out there

Most productivity hacks revolve around time. Plenty of people would’ve talked to you about the importance of time management. They would have advised you into it. However, time management alone is not ideal to become the most productive version of yourself. Here’s why.

Only time is fixed. Other factors are not. You can schedule a work session from 4am to 5am and another one from 5pm to 6pm. You can even enforce it and actually work during these sessions. My question is, though, can you guarantee that you will be as productive in one session as you are in the other? It is the same amount of time, but it is not guaranteed and, considering the time slots in the example, highly unlikely that you do the same amount of work in both sessions. In fact, a study from Stanford University shows that once you cross 50 hours of work, productivity drops sharply. This is not just the 40 hours of work just in the office; this might be the passion project you’re working on, or the new course you’re studying.  It is very easy to rack up 50 hours of work in a week. You could schedule time for those 50 hours, but every hour after that, your productivity will drop sharply. In fact, after 55 hours, the study found that additional work is practically useless.

Another reason is the Planning Fallacy. We, humans, severely underestimate the time required to complete tasks, even when they’ve done similar tasks like that before. Maybe an essay you thought will take 3 hours might take 5 hours. The problem with time management is it doesn’t account for unpredictability. It doesn’t take into account distractions or cognitive fatigue. Sometimes, life happens; time management doesn’t, in a way, care about that. So, what is the solution?

Let’s talk about it tomorrow.