Thoughts On “Time Management From the Inside Out” Part 1

I’ve been reading Julie Morgenstern’s book Time Management From the Inside Out. Am I impressed? Eh.In the interest of full disclosure, I’m one of those GTD people. I read David Allen’s book, it made sense to me, and I try to work the system he proposes. Back to the topic at hand . . .

The Big Thrust of Ms. Morgenstern’s book is a system that works more or less like this:

1. Decide what the big categories of things you want to spend your time on are
2. Decide how many hours you want to spend each week per category
3. Make a weekly schedule with blocks of time adding up to those totals for each category
4. Slot your actual to do items into those time blocks and do them when scheduled.

The rest of the book is about how to do each of those things or how to handle the fact that there’s more to do than there is time to get it all done in.

This really only works if two things are true:

1. You have a relatively predictable schedule
2. You have a relatively stable and predictable daily/weekly workload.
3. Your activities have relatively stable relative marginal value to you over time.

Someone who read her book would say she addresses the first hypothesis by talking about some alternatives to the preplanned weekly time blocks. In reality, she spends a couple pages on alternatives to the same while spending most of her time assuming exactly hypothesis number one.

As for the second hypothesis, well, okay, for people who don’t work in crazy professions where there’s no ability to plan more than a couple days in advance, it’s probably reasonable to believe number two can be met. On the other hand, how useful is it to write a plan when this week 40% of the work week hours are for project A and the next week 80% need to be for project A with everything else taking a backseat?

The third hypothesis, though, is to me most damming. It’s just not true that the tenth hour working on this or that is going to be as valuable this week as it will next week or the week after that. Sorry, those hours I set aside for exercise over lunch just can’t happen this week because we’re in the middle of getting certified. Time for conference calls with clients? Sorry, this week only the top couple and the few neediest are going to get my time and the rest I normally talk to are getting rescheduled. In other words, time we thought would be best spent on one set of actions this week could easily turn out to be better spent on something else and her model doesn’t really account for that.

I don’t buy any of those three hypotheses. Planning work is definately important and making time for certain well-defined activities is a hallmark of successful scheduling. However productivity is a knapsack problem because it’s all about trying to cram the most value into each block of time on several scales. THIS IS REALLY HARD. Harder, in fact, than “Time Management From the Inside Out” seems to acknowledge.

Bottom line: This book reminded me it’s important to schedule what can be scheduled. Was it worth the read? Eh. Am I going to shift to her method and away from GTD? No.