3 Psychological Hacks for Strategic Time Management and Better Productivity

One thing we all have in common is we get 24 hours a day. However, people differ in how they allocate their time. To reach our human potential and excel at goal achievement we must use our time well. The goal of this post is to give you some tips for strategic time management.

I use the word strategic because it refers to following a carefully developed plan or method to reach a goal. By using these three psychological hacks to manage your time better, you’ll be more productive and more likely to reach your goals.

1. Planning Fallacy and Strategic Time Management

The first psychological hack is based on a phenomenon known as the planning fallacy. This describes our tendency to underestimate the amount of time it takes to complete a task along with associated risks and costs. We’ve all probably had the experience that a project takes much longer than expected. One reason for this is we often face pressure to deliver quick results and agree to do something faster than is acutally possible.

Another reason has much to do with our thinking. In 1977 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky proposed that inaccuracies in intuitive judgements are “often systematic rather than random, manifesting bias rather than confusion.” This means that people generally have trouble making accurate predictions about the future due to cognitive biases.

The following are common underlying cognitive biases that help explain the planning fallacy.

Optimism Bias

Due to an optimism bias, people tend to overestimate their abilities and believe they will do things faster than they actually can. In fact, we’re generally pretty bad at accurately assessing our own abilities. We’re also generally optimistic about how things will turn out. Even if we ran into problems with planning in the past, we tend to believe that this time everything will be fine.

Anchoring

Anchoring refers to our tendency to allow the first information we encounter to overly influence our decision making. Our planning tends to rely too much on initial impressions, so we don’t consider other information thoroughly enough.

Confirmation Bias

The confirmation bias refers to our tendency to choose information that supports our beliefs while writing off anything that is contrary. After we’ve put in much effort to plan something, we’re obviously certain that our strategy is the best. For this reason, we tend to write off any information that does not support our decision. Furthermore, contrary information would seemingly put our competence into question and at the end of the day we just want to be right.

Representativeness Heuristic

The representativeness heuristic is a mental shortcut by which we aim to access the probability of an event based on an existing mental prototype that we have. This is a reason why stereotypes exist. People often judge entire groups of people based on biased, preconcieved notions. Eveyone does this to some extent. It’s a lot easier to make general judgements than to consider every individual case. This is not only a problem in society, but also in our planning.

Let’s say that you take on a project that is similar to something you’ve done in the past. You would naturally draw on your past experiences to evaluate the new project. You may even assume that the current project is pretty much the same as the other one. Because of this mental shortcut, you run the risk of neglecting crucial information. As a result, you might miss your deadline.

Use Strategic Time Management to Counter the Planning Fallacy

Here are some tips to help you counter the negative effects of the planning fallacy and improve your strategic time management.

1. Consider Singular and Distributional Information

It’s helpful to be aware that the planning fallacy exist, but this is definitely not enough. When planning use both singular and distributional information to evaluate the task. Singular information refers to evidence based on the inside view. You consider all available information that stems from the current situation. By contrast distributional information comes from the outside view. This includes learnings from past experiences, evidence from similar projects in the past, and input from qualified outside sources.

By using both singular and distributional information, you’re more likely to plan accurately. We get into trouble when we just rely on intuition and disregard external information.

2. Break the Task Down into Smaller Parts and Estimate the Time to Complete Each Part

It’s easier to accurately estimate the time it takes to complete smaller tasks. For strategic time management we can break down the large tasks into smaller components and estimate the time it takes to complete each part.

3. Set Specific Implementation Intentions

Also setting specific implementation intentions is related to more realistic goal-setting. Decide what you will do and when will do it. By doing this you tend to set more realistic goals and are more likely to follow through. Thinking through the specifics of project or task will help you to plan more accurately as you consider items that you would normally overlook.

Planning Fallacy Checklist

The following checklist can help you to improve the quality of your decision making and avoid the negative effects of the planning fallacy. This checklist comes from a conferene paper by Jan Polowczyk called Planning in the Perspective of Behavioral Economics: The Planning Fallacy. You can adjust the questions to make them more relavant to your situation.

Questions the Decision Makers Should Ask Themselves

1. Is there any reason to suspect motivated errors, or errors driven by the self-interest of the recommending team?

2. Have the people making the recommendation „fallen in love with it”?

3. Were there dissenting opinions within the recommending team?

Questions to Challenge the People Proposing a Course of Action

4. Could the diagnosis of the situation be overly influenced by salient analogies?

5. Have credible alternatives been considered?

6. If you had to make this decision again in a year, what information would you want, and can you get more of it now?

7. Do you know where the numbers came from?

8. Can you see a halo effect?

9. Are the people making the recommendation overly attached to past decisions?

10. Is the base case overly optimistic?

Questions Aimed at Evaluating the Proposal

11. Is the worst case bad enough?

12. Is the recommending team overly cautious?

2. Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (Bikeshedding) and Strategic Time Management

The second psychological hack is based on Parkinson’s law of triviality also known as bikeshedding. This refers to the tendency to spend a disproportionate amount of time on trivial tasks and details while neglecting important matters. This phenomenon was made famous by C. Northcote Parkinson in his 1958 book Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress.

Have you ever been in a meeting that you felt was a waste of time, because everyone spent too much time on a tangents or things that did not really matter? This is the law of triviality at play. Here is one explanation for this bias: when it comes to making decisions on more complex matters, the average person finds it difficult to contribute something of value. However, when it comes to something simpler, everyone is happy to offer an opinion.

As per the example given by Parkinson in his book, hardly any time was spent on discussing whether to invest in a nuclear reactor. However, the discussion about what color to paint the bike-shed filled 45 minutes. Hence the name bikeshedding.

Negative Effects of Bikeshedding

Bikeshedding is detrimental to personal and team productivity, because you get sucked into the easy components of a tasks and don’t leave enough time for the more complex aspects. As a result, you may miss a deadline or have to settle for suboptimal results.

Bikeshedding can also affect how we handle our to-do lists. We tend to focus on the items that don’t require much effort and end up neglecting more complicated tasks, even if they are more important. Let’s say that I have four tasks on my to-do list: conduct research, call a client, enter data and write a report.

I decide to start with research, because it’s relatively simple and mainly involves reading and noting useful information. I know I should work on the report next, because it’s the most complex and important task. The deadline is also rapidly approaching. But instead I call my client and enter data with the hope that I’ll finish quickly.

To my dismay, these tasks take longer than expected. By the time I work on my report I’m stressed, pretty tired and don’t have enough time to finish.

Use Strategic Time Management to Negate Bikeshedding

Here are some tips to help you counter the negative effects of bikeshedding and improve your strategic time management:

1. Streamline Your Meetings

In a meeting setting don’t try to discuss too many points. Just focus on one or two major items. You can also reduce the number of people who attend the meeting. Only invite those who can provide valuable contributions to the topic at hand. Another tip is to limit the length of the meeting. The longer a meeting drags on the less focused it tends to become.

2. Prioritize Your Most Important Tasks

Make a list of things you need to do. Prioritize the most important tasks and plan when and for how long you’ll work on each item. Also when working on a task don’t try to get everything done perfectly. Decide from the get go where you will spend most of your time.

For example, if you have to make slides for a presentation, don’t spend too much time trying out different fonts and colors. Spend the majority of your time working on the actual content. Even if the presentation does not look perfect, your overall result will be much better if you prepare compelling content.

3. Work in a Focused Way

Stay focused and complete one task at a time — don’t multitask. Also make sure that others don’t interrupt you during your focus time. For example, you can let your colleagues know ahead of time that you need to focus for the next two hours to get an important task done. But you’ll be available again afterwards.

3. Parkinson’s Law and Strategic Time Management

The third psychological hack is based on Parkinson’s law which states that work expands to fill the time allocated to it. C. Northcote Parkinson described this phenomenon in his 1955 essay for the Economist in which he notes the growth of bureaucracy in an organizational context. His observations stemmed specifically from his extensive experience in the British Civil Service.

Instead of trying to get things done quicker and more efficiently, we often use more time than is necessary. One explanation for this is that human beings tend to take the way that conserves the most energy resources. Instead of exerting a lot of effort in a short time, you’ll most likely exert moderate effort over a longer time. The problem with this approach is it doesn’t account for unexpected problems. We’ve all experienced projects that for various reasons were fraught with delays. Parkinson’s law helps explain why less than 40% of projects finish on time.

Why is Parkinson’s Law so Salient at Work?

How long does a task take? One answer is as much time as you have for it. If you have one day to write a report it will take a day. However, if you have two hours, you’ll finish in two hours. Even if we can finish something faster than the time allocated, we often don’t. Why is this the case?

1. In the organizational context employees often want to appear busy so as not to receive additional tasks. The underlying thought is if I get this done faster, than in the future, my manager will always give me less time.

2. Employees may also fear that managers will withdraw and reallocated resources if they overperform. So in the future, they won’t have as much support.

3. Stated bluntly another reason is people often have a natural tendency towards laziness and procrastination.

Use Strategic Time Management to Counter Parkinson’s Law

Use these tips to help you counter the negative effects of Parkinson’s law at the team and individual level:

1. Implement an Incentive Scheme

At the managerial level one of the most effective ways to mitigate Parkinson’s law is to implement an incentive scheme that rewards finishing key tasks early. By doing this, it’s possible to eliminate delays that come about by wasting time.

2. Give Yourself Less Time to Work on Things

Individually we can take steps to reduce the effects of Parkinson’s law on our productivity so that we have more time for things that matter to us. Consider how long you need to finish a certain task. Now try reducing the time by 25%.

For example, it takes me an average of about 8 hours to publish a blog article. In the future, I’ll give myself 6 hours. You’ve got to find out what is realistic in your situation. Eventually you’ll hit the sweet spot between having too much and too little time.

3. Take Steps to Counter Procrastination

Another strategy is to take measures to counter procrastination. One reason tasks take longer than needed is we tend to procrastinate. This is especially true for boring tasks. Because such work is not engaging, it’s hard to stay focused. Hence, we get easily distracted.

There are a few ways to get through this. You can make the boring task more motivating by associating it with something that is meaningful to you. For example, if I enter my data quickly, I can stop work early and go for a jog.

Another way to assign meaning is to view your task as part of a larger set to reach a broader goal. This is known as superordinate framing. Furthermore, if the task does not require strong concentration, you can pair it with a task that uses up some more of your excess attention. This strategy is known as tangential immersion.

Summary

In this article we considered three psychological hacks that you can use to improve your time management skills and thereby enhance your productivity.

Planning Fallacy

The first hack is based on a phenomenon known as the planning fallacy, which describes our tendency to underestimate the amount of time it takes to complete a task along with its associated risks and costs. The planning fallacy is especially detrimental for longer-term projects.

To not fall victim to the planning fallacy, it’s important to consider information from various sources. This includes information relevant to the situation at hand, learnings from past experiences and qualified advice from outside sources.

Another strategy is to break down the project into smaller components and estimate how long it will take to complete each part.

Finally determine exactly when you will work on each part of the project. This helps you to set goals more realistically and consider points that you would normally not consider.

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (Bikeshedding)

The second psychological hack is based on Parkinson’s law of triviality, also known as bikeshedding. Bikeshedding refers people’s tendency to spend a disproportionate amount of time on trivial tasks and details while neglecting more important matters.

To forgo the negative effects Parkinson’s law of trivitality has on meetings, you can set a time limit, focus on fewer topics and only invite people who can make meaningful contributions.

Regarding personal productivity always try to finish the most important tasks first. Furthermore, it’s important to use the time blocking strategy. This includes deciding when and for how long you will work on something. Always try to work in a concentrated and uninterrupted way, focusing on one thing at a time.

When completing a task spend more time on the crucial aspects. If faced with a tight deadline, don’t lose time trying to perfect minor things that in the end don’t make that much of a difference.

Parkinson’s Law

The third psychological hack is based on Parkinson’s law which states that work expands to fill the time allocated to it.

To counter Parkinson’s law, try reducing the amount of time you give yourself to finish a task. You don’t have to stress yourself with unrealistic deadlines. However, by experimenting with different timings, you’ll figure out how long you really need to complete something. Finally, avoid procrastination so that you can carve out more time for the things that really matter to you.