5. Fake project…
Fake project, beat Outlook
Calendars manage us and not the other way around. Protecting people’s space and time is a project to be taken seriously. Treat your time and other people’s time as the most important project. Apply the same discipline you use for other projects. That includes fixing meetings with yourself.
“Time is man’s last asset“, I wrote many years ago in an article and I repeated it in my book The Leader with Seven Faces (meetingminds, 2006) Today, life in some organisations is governed by the kind of automatic calendar (mis)management that blocks your time when you’re invited to meetings. There are no gaps, no spaces and no availability. We have converted business into busy-ness. I’m sure you can identify yourself with this picture. Calendars manage us; we no longer manage our calendars. In this time famine – as it has been called for decades now by many sociologists – there is little or no available personal space to think, reflect or even plan. With no available space and time, management merely manages the inevitable: that is, things that will happen anyway. But the interesting thing is that if managing your space and time were a project, you would probably take it seriously and you would like to be on top of it.
Let me remind you of what a project is, so that you can imagine what you could do with your time:
- There will be goals (you being able to make informed judgements)
- There will be deliverables (your capacity to think and perhaps your mental health!)
- There will be time allocated in your calendar (so you would block off time).
- Your secretary or assistant would pay attention and protect your commitments, saying ‘no’ when things occur at the same time as ‘the project’.
So why not treat your personal time in the same way?
- Go to Outlook or your calendar/project management system if you have one.
- Create a project. Call it Project M (for me) or project T (for time) or….
- Block time for meetings (with yourself).
- When you get an ‘automatic’ meeting invitation through Outlook that you – or your assistant – need to accept or decline, you would decline it when it clashes with project M or Project T.
- If you want to allow exceptions, they should only be the same big ones that would apply to other projects, e.g. your boss needs you at an urgent meeting.
Project M or Project T must be treated as an equal of other projects. I have called it ‘fake project’ in the title, because it is easy to remember. But is not fake at all, it is a very real project: the protection of you capacity to think, exercise judgement or feed your mind.
Protecting space and time is the survival skill of today. There is no skill more important. If you master this one, the rest will be easy. I have always been very sceptical of traditional time management measures such as the one provided by ‘time management courses’. In many cases, all they do is transform busyness-1 into busyness-2 and create a sense of order and a rational approach to activity management. Though there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, I am talking about something more serious and fundamental: the control over your calendar (instead of the calendar – the busy-ness, the multi-tasking, the incessant presenteism – controlling you).
I know that Project M (or T for time or MMH for my mental health!) is artificial and similar to all those time management practices that I tend to dislike. But I am willing to take this route for this serious issue. We are so hopelessly dependent on our circumstances that sometimes the only way to protect time is to artificially create it!
The disruptive ideas that are compiled within the 10+10+10=1000 portfolio are not only presented for your own personal benefit. I am assuming you also care about the organisational life, i.e. you and others working together. Picture this for a second: you and your colleagues in total control of your own time and totally in charge of protecting your own space!
If you start to implement ‘fake’ project M, you’ll see that the sky won’t fall. If other people imitate you, you’ll soon see an organisation with more reflective power. And I can tell you that an organisation that can think is very powerful. An organisation without room and an Outlook that is booked solid for months in advance can’t do much.
Busyness and business are two different words.
The fullness of your Outlook calendar is not a criterium of success. You can even argue that it is the exact opposite.
Start project M now and enjoy the planned meetings with yourself. Drop something to make room for project M.
Quote 1 for your office:
“All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.” (Blaise Pascal)
Quote 2 for your office:
“The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.” (General Charles de Gaulle)
