6 Timex claims it is ‘True Since 1854’, but this is being economical with the truth. The Timex Corporation was only established in 1969, the new name for the US Time Corporation, which itself had formed from the ashes of the failing Waterbury Clock Company (est. 1854). The leading force behind the company’s post-war success was a shy Norwegian refugee named Joakim Lehmkuhl, who had fled his native country at the time of the Nazi invasion in 1940. When he became president of Waterbury in Connecticut in 1942, the company’s experience with time was diverted into making ammunition fuses for the British military. But his biggest asset was what the Swiss had lost – its delight in invention and innovation. The American company Ingersoll had already achieved great success with its $1 watch, even though it was highly unreliable. Lehmkuhl saw no reason why Americans shouldn’t benefit from accurate timekeeping that endured, or at least endured until they could afford to spend another $10 on the next one. The watch chimed with the great boom in American consumerism and the desire to purchase patriotically. The watches were sold not through the usual respectable jewellery outlets, but more like soap powder – in F.W. Woolworth and other chain stores, and through mass-market catalogues. It worked.
7 Many companies claim to have ‘invented’ the wristwatch, a development that usually entailed a client taking a pocket watch and strapping it around their arm. Breguet’s claim has more foundation: its order books show that a small oval timepiece with a silver dial was made for Caroline Murat, the younger sister of Napoleon Bonaparte, specifically to be attached to a bracelet.
8 My favourite is one for Tripp luggage. A while ago, before all new suitcases had four wheels, the big innovation was luggage that grew bigger. You unzip a compartment and, voila, the case is one third as big again. Leagas Delaney’s advert featured a fat case and the headline ‘The expandable suitcase. Now you can steal the bathrobe as well as the toiletries.’
9 The Speedmaster was not the first watch in space, of course. As he hurtled in his red-hot Vostok on 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin wore a rather less complicated Sturmanskie, a military timepiece produced in Moscow and handed to many Soviet top guns after the war. Today, a stunning new Speedmaster will cost you around £3,500, with more for the special editions. But you can pick up a new Gagarin commemorative version Sturmanskie (quartz rather than mechanical) for £100.
10 It is also part of the James Bond empire. Its last outing – a modified Seamaster 300 with the black and grey NATO strap – was in Spectre and in glossy boutiques and magazines not long afterwards (the showroom model, costing £4,785, is, predictably enough, limited to 7,007 copies.) When Q (Ben Whishaw) presents Bond (Daniel Craig) with the watch in the obligatory gadgets scene, Bond asks ‘Does it do anything?’ And Q replies, ‘It tells the time.’ When Bond later finds himself in a tight spot, the watch aids his escape by exploding.
When time was a game: how to have fun at a party in the 1960s.
Chapter Twelve
Time Tactics That Work!
i) The Berry Season
Over the last couple of years I have amassed a number of self-help books on time management, but there is no aggregate book that offers advice on finding enough time to read them all. Most come with exercises and mental-workout programmes, and some recommend going online for bonus lessons and questionnaires. By the time you’re finished, you’re tired. Among my favourites:
18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bregman
15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management: The Productivity Habits of 7 Billionaires, 13 Olympic Athletes, 29 Straight-A Students and 239 Entrepreneurs by Kevin Kruse
The 26 Hour Day: How to Gain at Least Two Hours a Day with Time Control by Vince Panella
It’s About Time: Find 5 Extra Hours Each Week by Harold C. Lloyd
Time Tactics That Work: 107 Ways to Get More Done by Gavin Preston
Five Minutes a Day: Time Management for People Who Love to Put Things Off by Jean Reynolds PhD
More Time, Less Stress: How to Create Two Extra Hours Every Day by Judi James
The 12-Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington1
And this is only the beginning, a mere scratching of the surface of the amount of time that can be saved or gained in an hour/day/week/month by following these easy methods/steps/secrets. Why not also try:
Two Awesome Hours: Science-based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done by Josh Davis
The Power of a Half Hour by Tommy Barnett
The 15-Minute Total Life Makeover: 12 Ways to Dramatically Change Any Area of Your Life in Just 15 Minutes a Day by Christina M. DeBusk
75 Secrets Revealed on Time Management Skills: The New Organised You in Just 3 Hours – Volume 1 (10 Mins a Day) by Joe Martin
Most of these carry similar advice: save mornings for real work; stop multitasking and do one thing well; make time for yourself; get enough sleep; plan a whole day without any meetings. Only occasionally does a novel suggestion leap out. In 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management: The Productivity Habits of 7 Billionaires, 13 Olympic Athletes, 29 Straight-A Students and 239 Entrepreneurs, for example, the author Kevin Kruse writes that we should all stop making to-do lists. The items on to-do lists never get completed, he argues, they merely get transferred onto other, longer to-do lists. To-do lists prioritise the urgent over the important (urgent being the water leaking through the ceiling, important being the family photo album that never gets done) and do not distinguish between items that take a short amount of time and a long one, with our natural tendency to knock off the quick ones first. He has research to back this up, and it concludes that 41 per cent of to-do-list items are never completed.2 Rather than a to-do list, Kruse suggests a well-maintained and rigorously apportioned calendar.
Kruse also has an answer to the puzzle ‘Can three simple questions save you eight hours a week?’ The answer of course is yes. He calls these ‘Harvard Questions’, because they derive from Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen, two professors claiming in the Harvard Business Review that one reason we like to feel busy all the time is because it makes us feel important. But in 2013 the professors found that busyness in itself wasn’t actually very productive. When they retrained workers to slow down and think more about their actions, they found that on average their subjects saved six hours of desk work and two hours of meeting time per week. The three questions were: What items on my to-do list can I drop entirely? What items can I delegate to a subordinate? What do I need to be doing but can do in a more efficient way? The key to so many problems of limited time – not just for Kruse, but also for the majority of these authors and researchers – is delegation. You hire someone. If you are Tony Robbins, the motivational life coach and author of such hits as Awaken the Giant Within, you hire someone to get your suits from the dry cleaner’s so you can concentrate on other things: ‘I don’t do anything that someone else can do better.’ Or if you are Andrea Waltz, the co-author of Go For No!, the more you delegate, the more you thrive. Or if you are Lewis Howes, host of the ‘School of Greatness’ podcast, ‘Focus on what you are great at and hire everyone else to do the rest.’ It’s the same thing in 30 books: buy time from somebody with time to spare. But what happens if you can’t afford to hire somebody else? ‘You always can,’ says Tony Robbins. ‘You’ll see.’
Kruse is no novice to time management. He started his own company when he was 22, and it turned out to be a miserable failure (he showered in the local youth hostel). According to his autobiography, it was only when he discovered the power of Wholehearted Leadership and how to Master Your Minutes that he became the man he is today, the founder of several multimillion-dollar companies. Along the way he has amassed plenty of temporal information to transform a day, and thus a week and a life. Kruse’s central source of information is the Kruse Group, his time management research bank, and the information that shines brightest is
this: ‘People who actively look for things to delegate report higher levels of productivity, happiness and energy, and are less likely to feel “overworked and overwhelmed”.’ In the digital environment, delegation no longer means overloading a beleaguered person on a lower pay scale in an office (i.e. dumping on the less fortunate), but outsourcing with an app or URL; time-saving has become democratic, and a goldmine for start-ups. So Kruse has enlisted a phalanx of workers to help him save time when producing his books (there is Clarissa, a cover designer in Singapore who he’s never met; Balaji in India, involved in data mining, ditto; Serena, handling his email enquiries from Thailand; and Camille, a book editor he found on fiverr.com, lives in the US, ditto).
Many of Kruse’s epithets may seem banal and oversimplified, but they may also be harder to achieve than they first appear. For example, the ‘Time Secrets of 29 Straight-A Students’ require exacting self-discipline:
i) Turn off social media.
ii) Don’t go out in the evenings, and socialise predominantly with your work peers during study sessions.
iii) Do small tasks that take less than five minutes immediately.
iv) Schedule ‘me time’. Be like Caitlin Hale, a medical student in New Jersey: ‘I make sure that every night I dedicate at least one hour to myself.’
The ‘Time Secrets of 13 Olympic Athletes’ are also productive:
i) Don’t plan your training schedule on your phone: get a large paper calendar instead as this helps with perspective of what you’ve achieved so far and what you still need to do.
ii) Don’t feel bad about saying no to people.
iii) ‘Rest is perhaps the most overlooked and undervalued aspect.’
iv) Be like Briana Scurry, the perfectly named goalkeeper who won gold medals as part of the US women’s soccer team in 1996 and 2004, and ask yourself: ‘Will this activity help me perform better and therefore help us win gold?’ She calls this focus ‘white-hot obsessiveness’.
Advice from Kevin Kruse and his cohorts tends to concentrate on saving time in the workplace with a familiar mission: maximise productivity, blitz the opposition, become wealthy, achieve the American Dream (almost all the books are indeed American – hard to see the tribes of Patagonia or Peru being crazy about me time or shaving ten minutes off meetings). These books all tend to have numbers in their titles, and thus measurable targets. But there is also a less driven approach to time management, a softer and more holistic side encompassing a work-life balance. So one may also learn interesting things from:
Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte
Time Management for Manic Mums: Get Control of Your Life in 7 Weeks by Allison Mitchell
Managing Time Mindfully: A Mindful Approach to Time Management by Tom Evans
Business Owners: Your Family Misses You: Time Management Strategies That Free up Two Hours a Day and Get You Loved Again by Mike Gardner.
Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy
Eat the Elephant: Overcoming Overwhelm by Karolyn Vreeland Blume
When you are done eating things, you could do a lot worse than start your domestic tune-up with I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time by Laura Vanderkam. ‘Time management will always be a popular topic because we all live our lives in hours and we all have the same number of hours,’ its author told me. She is also the author of What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast. ‘All the money in the world can’t buy you a second more.’
You may, in the parlance of this genre, turn your sneers to cheers: the sentiments in Vanderkam’s book impress even as her prose sometimes cloys. We learn that she had an enlightening moment one June afternoon while strawberry picking on a farm in Pennsylvania with two of her children. She noticed the poetic line on an empty fruit box: ‘Remember the berry season is short.’ The box held about 10lb when level full, and perhaps 15lb when heaped, and she wondered if her life could do the same. ‘What you do with your life will be a function of how you spend the 8,760 hours that make a year, the 700,000 or so that make a life.’ She resolved to spend more time ‘at strawberry farms, as well as rocking toddlers to sleep and pursuing work that alters at least some corner of the universe’.
For Vanderkam, that work has involved sending detailed weekly time grids to 143 working women, providing her with 1,001 (143×7) days with which to study the hourly pursuits of work, home and self. This ‘Mosaic Project’ was made up of half-hourly tiles throughout the day from 5 a.m. to midnight; participants had to fill in each tile no matter how dull, predictable, repetitive or slightly embarrassing that period had been. If you had spent two hours on Facebook that would be four tiles, and honesty was all. In the middle of March 2014, aged 35, Vanderkam filled out her own time grid, and when she published it I felt like a voyeur. On Tuesday, 18 March, for example, she was up working at 6. This continued for three tiles, and at 7.30 it was breakfast with the kids. She then worked on an unspecified project until 10.30 a.m., when the complexion of the work changed: for two tiles it was now listed as ‘Work (brainstorm ideas)’. Emails took over for an hour at 1 p.m., then there was an hour-long interview, and the tiles between 3 and 4 were split between work and a run. So far so boring, but then things got a little more varied: the next work tiles were spent on drafting a piece for Oprah, continuing her Mosaic project, and going to the library to write (‘novel, 2000 words!’). At 7.30 she ate sushi out, and at 8 she drove home after filling her gas tank. The next tile was reading to her kids and putting them to bed, followed by a tile of TV, a shower tile (yes!) and many tiles of bed. Wednesday’s highlights included a tile titled ‘Work, primp for video call’ followed by one that says ‘Video call doesn’t happen, inefficient!’ At 2 p.m. a tile reads ‘2 p.m. call also doesn’t happen’. There is better news later in the day: ‘Dinner with family’ at 6.30, but then partial disaster: ‘2 kids to Ikea, J. watch Frozen’.
The weekends looked rather different, for that was predominantly family time. On Saturday she gets up an hour later, cleans, spends four tiles at the Scouts’ Pinewood Derby, plays outside with the kids and invests five tiles on a date night at a restaurant with her husband. Reading it from afar, one can’t help but look for the tile(s) in which she might have had sex, but the only possible hint is Sunday at 10.30 p.m., when the tile billed as ‘shower’ during the rest of the week becomes ‘shower etc.’
Analysing her log once the week was over, Vanderkam was disappointed that her evenings weren’t as effective as she would have liked, as she was doing a lot of multitasking. If she had to work in the evenings she hoped to have a clearer idea of what she wanted to accomplish, rather than just drifting in and out of her inbox. I asked Vanderkam what she found most surprising about all the time logs she had collected from other people, and she told me she was impressed with the levels of flexibility people have.
Even women in fairly traditional jobs find ways to move the hours of work around to make the pieces of their lives fit together. I found that about three-quarters of women did something personal during work hours. Of course, the flip side is true too. Three-quarters did something work-related at night, or on weekends, or in the early mornings. To me, the two are completely related, so it misses the mark to call one good and the other bad.
In the course of her research, Vanderkam exposed some false assumptions. Americans tend to think they are working more hours than their parents did, but the opposite may be true: according to surveys by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, the average working week fell from about 42.4 hours in 1950 to 39.1 hours in 1970. In 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the average (non-farm) working week had fallen to 34.5 hours. Averages can be deceptive, of course, not least the suggestion that people are happy working fewer hours; this may mean less pay and thus an inability to enjoy increased leisure time. Working hours are no longer much indication of busyness either.
Vanderkam found
what most veterans of survey analysis already know: people tend to lie. ‘Looking at the numbers, most people aren’t overworked,’ Vanderkam says. ‘In a decade of writing about time and careers, I’ve come across studies that show a fascinating tendency of white-collar workers to inflate their work hours.’ This applied particularly to those employed in what she calls ‘white-collar sweatshops’, the traditionally punishing arenas of finance and tech. ‘No one wants to be seen as working less than the guy in the next cube.’ The observation is backed up by research conducted over decades by the sociologist John Robinson at the University of Maryland and colleagues. Writing in the Monthly Labor Review in 2011, and using data from the American Time Use Survey, they found that when they compared estimates of hours worked with detailed time sheets, those who claimed they were working 75-hour weeks were exaggerating by about 25 hours. ‘The Executive Time Use Project’ at the London School of Economics surveyed more than 1,000 CEOs in 6 countries and reported in 2014 that the average CEO spent 52 hours a week on work activities: a significant figure but not the excessive striving one is familiar with from literature and the movies. Seventy per cent of those in the survey said they worked no more than five days.
‘When I get in a sombre mood it makes me angry, because I think there’s something insidious going on,’ Vanderkam says. ‘By exaggerating workweeks, people can make some jobs appear off-limits to those who care about having a life. Making women – and men – think that they must inevitably choose between a particular career and their families will knock a huge chunk of the competition out.’
This may be the true value of these tiles and time logs: beyond merely deepening our desire to exploit every waking minute, they may show users that their lives weren’t quite what they thought they were. ‘The best outcome for some was changing the stories they were telling themselves,’ Vanderkam told me. ‘A popular one: working moms don’t spend enough time with their kids. One woman looked at her time log and realized she was spending every moment that her school-aged children were awake at home with them. After seeing that, she said that she used to feel guilt, but she didn’t feel guilt any more. If she wanted to go to the gym, it was OK.’
Timekeepers Page 22
