It’s a New Year. Time for a change. A new job. How can you use psychology to give yourself an edge?

“The VIA survey will give you brilliant material for an interview. You’ll have a scientifically validated list of the qualities that make you unique.”

A really good place to start is the VIA survey of character strengths – It’s free, you just have to register to use it. I like it because it makes you think about who you are, not what you do. You’ll get a list of your signature strengths, like Love of Learning; Fairness, Equity and Justice; or Judgement, Critical Thinking and Open-Mindedness. You can read more about it in the Martin Seligman book “Authentic Happiness”. Seligman was the founding light of Positive Psychology, which shifted the focus from a “What’s Broken?” model to “What’s Great” frame. That’s an excellent jumping off point when looking for a new job, you can play to your strengths. Otherwise it’s easy to waste a lot of time rectifying or concealing your “weaknesses”. The VIA survey will give you brilliant material for an interview. You’ll have a scientifically validated list of the qualities that make you unique.

It’s also good to find out what your motivations are for leaving your current job (assuming you have one). I love Daniel Pink’s book ” Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” . I love it because research shows that what we think motivates us (money, shiny things, big houses) isn’t what motivates us. What we really seek is Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Very different to the carrots and sticks usually on offer in the workplace. You might want to buy your old boss a copy as well. Did you know that having a bad boss is the most common reason for wanting to get a new job?

I’d also modestly suggest getting a Time Intelligence Report for yourself. It will tell you how you score on Motivation, Planning, Execution and Reflection, as well as the all important Time Perspective. Why do you need to know these things? Well, if you’re looking for a new job, you need to change from your current negative state of disillusionment with the past (old job) to a more optimistic, future-orientated state of optimism. The Time Intelligence Report will get you there, with a personal diagnosis and list of positive actions to take.

The Time Intelligence Report is only £1 until the end of January.

You can get it here

Time’s in your head

My earliest memory is when I was about four years old. As I remember it, there was a snowy winter that seemed to go on for ages. The snow was deep and didn’t melt for weeks – a rare thing in England. I remember making snowmen, and throwing snowballs at/ with my brother and cousin.

I don’t really know whether the snow lasted for weeks – it certainly seemed like it, but I hadn’t started at school, so time wasn’t yet divided into weekends and weekdays. It was a continuous, unstructured Present. And my memory of it now is a distorted, reconstructed version of what actually happened, fifty years ago. All of this is taking place in my head, it’s the only place I can locate my Past.

But time is obviously a thing, you say. We have clocks. We divide those years into months, weeks, days, femtoseconds. It must be a thing if we can manipulate it and measure it like that. I can see the distinction between yesterday, which has already happened, and tomorrow, which hasn’t yet.

Here’s what Einstein said:

“….the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly  persistent illusion”

Have a think about your last holiday. What kind of time did you have? Compare the quality of that time with queueing at the post office. I’m willing to bet that they feel different, even though they both had a duration that could be measured.

When you procrastinate, you’re doing some mental gymnastics to keep you from completing a task. It’s not that you don’t physically have enough time. You put off doing something important to you by choosing to do something less important. Maybe you don’t know why, but it’s definitely a mental operation.

But so what? What if time is an illusion. How does that change things back in the real world?

If it’s an illusion, we’re not all seeing the same thing. That means we’re not all having the same experience at the same time. It’s different for all of us. And that’s important at work, at home, with colleagues, friends, kids, lovers, neighbours – whoever. In the present,  we’re not having a digitally perfect “experience” being played to us, and when we remember the past, we’re not replaying the same DVD. It gets filtered, distorted and remade at all stages, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

And then we have to take into account how different cultures view time.

It’s no wonder that guy in sales never gets his monthly report in on time. If your boss is always late for a meeting, is it poor-timekeeping or disrespect? When you’re told that the meeting next Friday (8th Nov) has been moved back to Tuesday, what date is it now on? Feel free to use a calendar to work it out.

Answers on a postcard, or better still, leave a comment.

Time Poor

According to a Harvard behavioural economist and a Princeton psychologist:

“If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that you’ll have little in the future”

These guys have just published a book entitled “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much”. It doesn’t just cover being money poor, it looks at being time poor as well.

What they found is that money and time poor people have trouble escaping from the poverty trap because they have to single-mindedly focus so much on the problem, they lose perspective. They only look for immediate solutions that will fight the fire in front of them. They can’t see the longer term consequences of something that appears to fix the problem right here, right now.

Scarcity saps your mental energy so much that you can’t think straight. You have tunnel vision. That’s why people take out pay-day loans, and borrow short-term if they can’t afford to pay off other loans – it gets them over this hump.

How did this play out with the time poor? They carried out experiments on Harvard students, with video games. They had a fixed time to answer a question or complete a task. Some were allowed plenty of time. Others weren’t, but could to borrow time (time they would also need in the future). The borrowers got into a debt spiral, and they never won back enough time to pay the debt. These very smart people behaved incredibly irrationally under time pressure.

I was thinking about the irrational things I’ve done, and seen other people do, when I’ve been so squeezed for time that I can’t see my nose in front of my face. Here are just a few I’ll fess up to:

• Saying “I haven’t got time to show someone else how to do this” and doing it myself.
• Soldiering on through gritted teeth, as proof that I’m tough
• Working stupid hours covering three time zones, instead of dropping one
• Imagining that I was making myself indispensable by working long hours

Funny that they didn’t seem so stupid at the time, but looking at them now, they’re absurd.

Which gave me an idea for a competition.

We’ll give a £20 Amazon voucher to the best true life story about how you did something that only made things worse, when you were already time poor.

Please tell us your (true) story where it says “Please Leave a Comment” below. The more ridiculous, the better. We’ll pick a winner and announce it in two weeks’ time, on the 19th of October.

We humans are really bad at forecasts.

“Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law” 

Daniel Kahneman literally wrote the book about the Planning Fallacy. He won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, even though he’s a psychologist. He’s as smart as you can get. But he still fell into the very trap he himself identified.

“But we did not acknowledge what we knew. The new forecast still seemed unreal, because we could not imagine how it could take so long to finish a project that looked so manageable.” Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow

The problem is, thinking about the Future is hard. It’s a long way away for most of us, particularly Present Hedonists. It’s so far away, we have to construct it by airlifting the present and plonking it down in the general area. Maybe we’ll embellish it a little, but it looks a lot like today.

However, the Future is not more of the Present. It’s not today delayed by 12 months. When you finally arrive in the Future, it’s definitely not like it used to be. You find that your forecast failed to factor in an economic downturn; a change in management; contractual disputes; specification changes; mission creep; illness; holidays; bad weather. Plus it was just plain over-optimistic, because you needed a good business case to get your project authorised.

 So what can you do?

Tip #1. Phone a Friend. Once you have your forecast. Double it. Double it again. Then throw away your forecast and ask an experienced colleague who’s not connected to your project. Before you ask them, get them to bring to mind similar projects they have done in the past. That way they draw on real-life, rather than joining you in your over optimistic fantasy world.

Tip#2. Do a Pre-Mortem. I’ve written about pre-mortems before, here. They’re brilliant for eliminating group-think and the euphoria that pervades the early planning stages of any project. They force you to live in a dystopian future and explain how you got there. You wouldn’t want to live there, but it’s nice to visit, once in a while.

Have fun, and please let us know how you get on with your forecasting, in the Future.

We’re not in Kansas any more…

Read A Geography of Time, by Robert Levine. It’s a really witty, well-written book about time culture – how different cultures behave with time, based on his personal experiences and his own and his students’ experiments. We all do time differently. In Brazil, arriving at 4pm for a 1pm appointment is not necessarily being late.  Hopi North American Indians have no verb tenses for Past, Present and Future. The Spanish use one word for “expect”, “hope” and “wait” – esperar.

Levine has a unique way of measuring the pace of life, and he’s measured it in 31 different countries.

• Walking speed in downtown areas (time to cover 60ft)
• Waiting time in the post office to buy a stamp
• Accuracy of public clocks

He adds these proxies together, to rank countries by pace of life. The 1,2,3 is Switzerland, Ireland and Germany. Mexico brings up the rear in 31st place. There are all kinds of surprises in there – I’ve spent a lot of time in Ireland and would describe my experience overall as relaxed, rather than fast paced. The USA is only in 16th place, when it feels like they should be higher (yes, they walk fast, but have massively long waits in the post office, and the clocks are way out of time).

So all countries have a time culture. And within countries, all regions and individual cities have different time cultures. In the US, Boston is the fastest pace of life, Los Angeles is the most laid back. In general, the North-East industrial area occupies the top slots, and California takes four of the six bottom places (together with Shreveport, Louisiana, and Memphis Tennessee).

“CFOs tend to look rearwards, at last month, or last quarter. “

What does this mean for you at work? Well, if you work for an international, or multi-national, there will be many sub-cultures, where time works differently. You’re regarded as an alien if you fail to see this, and conform to those (often hidden) cultural norms. Even within departments, it only takes a moment to imagine how differently they perceive time:

• Finance – essentially looking in the past. Last month, last quarter.
• Sales – In the present, but slightly future focussed on the next quarter
• Legal – trained to look at the past to assess risk in an imagined future
• R&D – looking way into the future
• Operations – existing in a continuous present. The past is rewritten.
• Maintenance – issues occur in the present. But they plan for the future
• CEO – Strategically working to a 3 year plan

Now imagine you’re a CFO, whose looking for their next move to CEO. This article Forward Looking CFO (pdf) by the Wharton Business School describes how CFOs find it so hard to make the transition from a rearward looking discipline to a forward-looking CEO.

Have you experienced a culture clash like this? We’d love to hear about your experiences. Leave a comment below. And read the book, it will get you thinking.

When you’re time poor, it’s easy to think that you’re being more efficient if you pack as much as possible into those 1440 minutes in a day. Working at 100% capacity has to be efficient, right?

Here’s how stressed people with no time try to make more:

Speeding Up

• Speak faster. Miss things out.
• Skip lessons learned briefings
• Cancel “soft” meetings like 1:1s and reviews

Replacing a long-duration activity with a short one

• Email instead of phoning or meeting face to face
• Skimp on background information

Multitasking

• Emailing during meetings
• Not finishing one task before starting another
• Driving and texting or phoning

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs4lO2IceFk

• Walking and texting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNyTqIsrk0w

Wall to wall scheduling

• Leaving no gaps between activities
• Not leaving enough time for any one  activity
• Scheduling “free time” 
• Racing from one thing to another

Time and Space are inseparable concepts, ask any physicist. So are No Time and No Space.

Oh, and there’s a fifth one. Looking for quick-fix tips, tricks and apps about time management, hoping they will make you time rich. They’re the Ponzi schemes of the time management industry. You’ll spend your time trying them out, but waste most of it, because only a few will ever work for you.

Do you recognise these behaviours in yourself or members of your team?

When I was 17, my friend wanted to be a pharmacist. His future wasn’t a dream, or even an ambition, it was more like a fact that hadn’t happened yet. Like an airline pilot planning a flight to Hawaii. He knew where it was, how to get there and how long it would take. I’m not sure why, pharmacy didn’t run in the family or anything, but that was definitely what he saw himself doing. He had a very clear picture of his future destination, which was real and immediate, not out there in the distance.

Mark’s now a very successful research chemist (in pharmacy), he’s exactly where he thought he would be, nearly forty years ago. I guess he’s had different aspirations along the way as well, but he’s achieved his lifetime career goal.

I admire Mark for his focus and vision (notice the visual words we use in English to talk about the Future). He’s very Future orientated.

Our time  perspectives drive how we all manage our time in the macro sense – managing our life time. They’re the dynamo that drives time management behaviour in the micro sense as well – how we manage our days and hours. Can we keep our eyes on the final destination, or are we more prone to deal with what’s appears right in front of us? This affects how and what we instinctively prioritise, regardless of what we think we should be doing, or what’s theoretically number one on our to-do list.

Mark’s goal  may have been way out in the future, but it had two essential qualities. Firstly, it was connected to the present by his sense of purpose. He was highly motivated in the here and now to work towards it. Secondly, the goal was more than just a vision, it was a fully realised thing that he could touch, smell, taste and hear, as well as see. When those two qualities are present, the destination is a real place, worth going to, worth spending time getting there.

So, if you can make your goal real for yourself and other people, and if you can connect it to your inner motivations, you will be propelled towards it, and it will get more real as you draw closer.

Let us know if that’s interesting to you.

Stuck in the Past

Last time we examined the power of a Positive Past. A Negative Past can have an equally powerful effect. When we talk of people being “stuck in the past” – it’s a negative past that we’re thinking about. Incidentally, I think people can also be stuck in the Present and stuck in the Future – but that’s the subject of another blog.

In terms of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, someone with a negative past will strongly agree with statements like “I think about the bad things that have happened to me in the past” and “It’s hard for me to forget unpleasant images of my youth”. In other words, they ruminate.

Just because someone has a high Past Negative, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be negative. Different people respond in different ways. We often see a high Past Negative linked to a high Future, where the subject is using the past as a motivating force to create a better future.  Sometimes it can be linked to high Present Hedonist behaviour – where perhaps the subject is blotting out the bad memories by having a good time, maybe too much of a good time.

So how do we deal with someone who can’t escape a negative past? Coaching often tends to focus on the present and the future and leaves difficult issues in the past to therapists or psychoanalysis. If indicated, we would refer a client to such a professional. However, there are simple techniques which we can use as interventions.

Using these techniques, it is possible to change our beliefs about the past, the stories we tell ourself about what happened, and the meaning we attribute to those stories. This doesn’t have to be done by reliving the past, it’s about rebalancing and re-framing the past, the present and the future, and not investing so much energy in ruminating on the past.

We use NLP for these kind of re-frame exercises, to write yourself a new story, one with a better ending (or even a better beginning), because our interpretation of events can change over time. Another favourite is the ABCD method. Adversity. Beliefs. Consequences. Disputation. When we meet a bad situation we come at it with a stock set of beliefs, which lead to an outcome. You can learn to reconfigure those beliefs by using Disputation – so you argue against your habitual self-talk. It needs a bit of help, but it’s a great new habit to form, if you want to escape that cycle of self-recrimination and regret, stop ruminating, and get yourself a new outcome.

Time Perspectives

The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory that we use in our Time Intelligence Report has two distinct flavours of the Past, Positive and Negative.

As concepts they’re self-explanatory. Is your past something you look back on fondly, or do you have bad memories of growing up? The surprising part is how powerfully having a positive past can affect your outlook in the present and the future.

Being positive about your past is a predictor of resilience and optimism. Martin Seligman, the principal founder of Positive Psychology discovered that an optimistic explanatory style was key to persistence. Believing that things will turn out well, despite setbacks, predicts success at school, in college and in work. In his book “Learned Optimism“, Seligman tells how he and his team successfully predicted US election results (primary and presidential) purely by analysing candidates’ speeches. The more they spoke of hope for the future, the more optimistic they were, the better chance they had of being elected.

Past positive people will get nostalgic about the good old days. They will surround themselves with photographs and souvenirs to prompt these good memories, and are the repositories of family stories and anecdotes. It’s possible to strengthen the positive links your past by keeping a gratitude diary, or just bringing to mind some good things that have happened, at the end of each day.

It’s common these days to assume that a tendency to think about the past is inevitably a bad thing – anyone “stuck in the past” will slow down our progress towards the future. They won’t be of any use looking backwards wearing their rose-tinted spectacles. The surprising truth is that those are the people you need when things start to go wrong on your project. Their roots go deep and they will suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, then bounce back.

Next time we’ll have a look at Past Negative.

In the UK, the clocks spring forward this weekend, so we’ll be on British Summer Time. We get an extra hour of daylight.  Not many people seem to miss the lost hour of moonlight, so it seems like we get an extra hour, just by changing the way we measure time. It’s a collective delusion that we’re mostly happy to go along with. Although in 1916 when it was first introduced, people protested at their lost time.

When we think of time as hours and minutes, days and weeks, we’re really  only thinking about how we measure time, that’s not time itself. When we divide time into the Past, Present and Future,  that’s a description of our experience, rather than places we can go and visit in the car.

Our subjective experience of time can be completely different from one moment to the next. Time spent waiting for a lift seems a lot longer than it actually is, time flies when you’re enjoying yourself, or when you’re in Flow.

So there’s clock time – the one that we measure, and there’s lived time, the one that we experience. It’s easy to confuse the two, and imagine that we can manage clock time; when really we can only manage our experience. There are hundreds of self-help books selling the idea that  setting goals, writing to-do lists, prioritising and organising is the solution. Research shows that doing these things enhances our perception of control, which makes us feel better for a while, but it won’t permanently fix the problem, which is how we experience time.

Time Management is about Perceived Control

So how can I change the way I experience time? In psychology the dominant theory of Time Perspective is based on Zimbardo and Boyd’s research, which started with this paper (academic pdf) in 1999. Using a tool they developed, you can map your current preferences. Here’s how my map looks:

Time Perspectives

I’m pretty high on Present Hedonistic, and low on Future. That means I like to live in the Present and don’t plan for the Future. And I don’t really think much about the Past at all.

All that makes it a pretty good bet that I would prefer to spend my extra hour of daylight doing something that gives me a kick right now, rather than thinking about my pension contributions or worrying about tomorrow, or going to the gym.

But now that I know I’m not so great at keeping to a plan, I can start to choose to do things differently. I can better resist the gravitational pull of Now and invest some time in the Future. I can keep promises that I make to my future self, even when faced with present temptation – which will make me feel a lot better about my time use than writing another To-Do list.

And that, my friends, is what Time Management should be about. We call it Time Intelligence.