The Business Sensei

Tortoise and Hare Schedules

Remember the old story of the tortoise and the hare? Aesop’s old fable about a race between the extremely fast hare and the slow tortoise is a famous one, appearing in countless children’s books. It also made its appearance on Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Bugs Bunny Show. In the latter case, the role of the hare was played by no less a personage than Bugs Bunny himself, which is almost, but not completely, totally unlike getting Sir Lawrence Olivier to appear in a high school production of Hamlet.

The fact is, though, the story has tremendous longevity. This little race fable has, as it were, “legs.” If there is one thing that story tortoise, it’s that speed simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Indeed, one of the fastest people I’ve ever met was a 75 year old Judo master. He never seemed to move all that much, but no matter how fast we tried to hit him, somehow we always hit the ground instead. His secret, he told us, was that we simply had to be in the right place at the right time. As long as we could do that, we didn’t have to move very fast.

This same question of speed plays into how we experience time and, by extension, how productive we are. When we feel that we don’t have much time, we try to move faster. This is tiring: the hare, as you’ll recall, fell asleep before the end of the race. Not only that, and odd as it may sound, the faster we move, the less time we feel like we have. In a shocking counterpoint to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which says that the faster we go the more time slows down, when we go fast, time seems to speed up as well. My physicist friends assure me, however, that this would change if I could simply move at a rate approaching the speed of light. Failing that, we need to learn to experience time differently, and use time in ways that maximize our productivity without leaving us exhausted.

Fortunately, there are ways to do this. Instead of viewing time as ticks on a clock or blocks on a calendar, we need to step back from that rigid construction of time and instead view time for what it actually is: Nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen all at once. Time imposes a sequence on our activities, and it does that no matter how much we may wish otherwise. That sequence, however, can be used to our advantage. Instead of being locked into a rigid, clock-based image of time, we can instead view time as a series of events. Each event triggers the next event. What does this mean?

When we are locked into a clock-based view of time, we attempt to start and stop activities according to the number on the clock: 3pm have pre-meeting meeting, 3:30pm meeting, 7pm post meeting discussion, and so on. When we are working with others and need to coordinate a variety of different people, use of space, and allocation of other resources, then we need to impose some of that clock based ordering. Too much of it though just slows us down: if something takes longer, or shorter, than expected, suddenly the whole schedule is thrown off. We get distracted and suddenly find ourselves running behind or forget to take breaks and wear ourselves out too soon.

Instead, within our blocks of time, and whenever we are working in a relatively unstructured environment, we need to think in terms of events. What events are happening around us? What events are we causing? Our events can be used to trigger us to change activities or take breaks. In one office, the coffee cart coming around was the trigger for people to take a break and move to a different task. An engineer working at home used the school bus driving by in the morning and mail deliveries in the afternoon as events to trigger him to switch tasks. We can even take this a step further, and create explicit linkages of events for our own uses: when I finish testing this piece of code, I will make a cup of coffee. When I finish my coffee I will review the documentation. When I finish… and so on.  When we plan and connect events this way, it’s amazing how much time we don’t waste just trying to decide what to do next.

The other piece of managing our perception of time is to create a schedule that we can beat. It’s quite amazing: when we’re ahead of schedule, we are simultaneously more relaxed and more energized. We focus better and come up with more creative solutions to problems. Unexpected obstacles are fun challenges. When we are behind schedule, we feel rushed. Every delay feels like a crisis. We take shortcuts and make more mistakes.

Ultimately, teams that are ahead end up further ahead. Teams that are behind, end up further behind. People who are rushed don’t see what is in front of them, lose track of where they are, and exhaust themselves too soon. If you want to win, design a schedule that you can beat not one that beats you.

The Less You Do…

When I started practicing jujitsu, my sensei would teach a technique and then tell us not to over-control our partners when we attempted to do it. We’d all nod and successfully fail to execute the technique. My sensei would demonstrate it again, and we’d grab our partners and attempt the throw, jerking and hauling, and adjusting position until our partners completely failed to leave the ground. Sensei would demonstrate the technique yet again, and eventually we might notice that he really didn’t do very much. There was none of this jerking and adjusting and fiddling around. Rather, he’d start the technique and then just wait while the person he was doing it to reacted. He seemed to be not exerting any control or effort at all, yet his partners just fell down.

What my sensei had learned, and the rest of us had not, was patience. We would start a technique and when we didn’t get immediate results, we would assume it wasn’t working and try to fix it. Our attempts to “fix” the technique were, in fact, the reason it wasn’t working. How rapidly a technique works depends on the specific technique and the person you are doing it to: a taller person simply takes longer to go over your shoulder than a shorter person. A lock takes longer to run through a long, flexible body than a short, tight one. By not giving those bodies time to react, we were actually negating the effects of the techniques as fast as we started them.

I find a very similar problem playing out in the work place: a manager tells his group to get something done and before they’ve really had a chance to react, he’s running around exhorting them or trying to figure out why they aren’t moving. In fact, they were moving. Now that he’s in the way, they’re not moving any more. It takes time for a group to process information and then figure out the best ways to move forward. That critical planning time is essential to the group’s success. In short, the group needs time to react.

When the leader starts running around, he is effectively negating the progress of the group just as beginning students in jujitsu negate the progress of their techniques. What is worse, though, is that the manager’s frequent interventions themselves become the focus of attention. Instead of concentrating on the work that needs to get done, everyone is paying attention to the interventions and trying to change course each time something new is said or some new instruction is given. As people become steadily more frustrated, the quality of information processing only declines.

In one company, a particular VP had some issues with the way managers in his department were working. He instructed them to make changes, even brought in coaches to help them with the changes. Each time the coaches showed up, he had a different critical problem that they had to focus on “right now!” The coaching ended up having little consistency from one day to the next. The net result was that the company spent a good deal of money and got very little to show for it.

So how do you avoid the trap of too many interventions?

Start by defining what your results should look like. In jujitsu, this is often pretty easy, usually involving a person lying on the ground. In a business environment, it may be a bit more complicated but is still eminently doable. It just takes some up front investments in time and energy.

As much as possible, define the steps you will take to get those results. What are they and how do they connect to the results? Sometimes you can’t draw a perfectly clear path, so you need to make sure you include steps to evaluate and adjust course as needed.

Then determine how you’ll know you’re making progress. What things will happen that will give you early feedback that you are on course or off course? Having some clue about both is important: if no warning signs are appearing, you don’t want to mess around. Depending on what you are doing, the first signs of success may take a while.

This brings us to our next point: how long will it take to get results? Everyone wants results Right Now, but rarely does the universe cooperate. Indeed, as we’ve already seen, the more we demand Right Now, the longer things end up taking. It’s important, therefore, to consider how long the first steps will take. Of course, if you really want to make success more likely, make sure you start with some easy steps that can be completed quickly and will build momentum. Once you start succeeding, it’s easier to keep going.

Like in jujitsu, it often really is the case that the less you do, the more you get.

Time Blindness

Imagine for moment that you are back in college. In fact, you are a divinity student. Okay, I realize that some people might find this difficult to imagine, but bear with me. You’re a divinity student and you are about to give a talk on the Good Samaritan. On your way to the chapel, you see someone lying on the ground, clearly in distress. What do you do?

Now, the fact is, most people given this scenario state that they would help the person, or at least call 911. The reality, however, is sometimes just a bit different. In this case, fully half the divinity students walked right by the person lying on the ground. What was going on here? Why did half the students stop and help and half ignore the apparently ill person?

It turns out that in this particular little experiment, all the divinity students received a phone call while they were in their dorm rooms preparing for their talks. Half of the students were told that, although they had plenty of time before their talk, the organizers would appreciate it if they came down to the chapel right away. The other half were told they were late and need to come down to the chapel immediately. Which group ignored the person on the ground? If you guessed the second group, you’d be right.

It turns out that time has some funny effects on how we process information and manage our goals. When we think we have a great deal of time, we consider new information more carefully, we make adjustments, and we revise our plans if necessary. But when we feel rushed or under a tight deadline new information is easily ignored. Those students who were suddenly feeling rushed? They were so focused on their goal of giving a talk on the importance of helping others that they were not processing the information in front of them, even though that information was directly related to the content of their speech.

Practically speaking, what does all that mean?

I worked with a client where everyone believed that their problem was that they were not communicating. They made great efforts to make sure that everyone spoke to everyone else, and that important information was communicated across the company. Despite all these efforts, nothing would change. People would still pursue goals even when those goals were no longer possible.

Well, one of the great benefits of goals is that they help us focus our attention on the things that matter. They also help us to ignore distractions. Unfortunately, one of the great drawbacks of goals is that they focus our attention and help us ignore distractions, particularly when we’re on an aggressive schedule.

The problem at that client wasn’t that they weren’t communicating. The problem was that they were not taking the time to evaluate the new information. Even worse, the very fact that they were feeling time pressure meant that they were already inclined to ignore any new information. Like that person lying on the ground, the new information was treated as a distraction from the important task ahead. Figuratively speaking, they simply walked past it.

So what can be done to prevent this from happening?

A critical part of goal planning is including time to check for new information and then consider what that new information means. Part of doing that successfully is allocating time for that one task and only that one task: what is new and what does it mean to what we are doing now? If you try to evaluate new information late in a meeting or mixed in with other material, it just doesn’t work. Rush people and they rush past the new data.

It’s only when we both create time for new information to enter the conversation and create time to process that information that we can see the man on the ground and take the appropriate actions.

What Is The Momentum of Time?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

As we discussed when we looked at the High Performance Cycle and goal setting, goals have momentum. In a more precise sense, success has momentum. When we are succeeding, we feel better about ourselves, our work, and the organization we are a part of. How we manage time plays a major role in our perceptions of success.

As we saw earlier in this chapter, when we feel rushed, our perceptions narrow. We don’t see things that are right in front of us. We will even miss things that matter deeply to us: when they felt rushed, our divinity students speaking on the Good Samaritan completely missed their opportunities to live up to the content of their talks. In business settings, people in a hurry will spend days, weeks, or sometimes months not noticing the solution that is staring them in the face.

Whenever we are running behind our schedules, we end up feeling rushed. Being behind schedule might trigger people to work hard, but they do so at the expense of working smart. When we are behind schedule, every minor problem becomes a major disaster. It’s just one more thing that is preventing us from hitting our deadlines and getting the job done! As a result, we tend to respond with quick fixes and overly simple solutions just to get the problem to go away. At one software company, when the product team was clearly not going to make the deadline, the director of engineering grudgingly allowed them another two weeks. They still weren’t ready, so he did it again. This proceeded for about three months! Half of each two week chunk was spent undoing the quick fixes they’d implemented in their frantic race to finish during the prior two weeks, and the other half was spent instituting a new set of quick fixes! The constant feeling of pressure meant that no one had time to think or consider any solution that took more than a few days to implement. In three months of being behind schedule, they probably made about one month worth of actual progress! Had they just extended the schedule by six weeks or two months right from the start, they would have finished a lot sooner.

Conversely, when a team is running ahead of schedule, people are much more energized and creative. The feeling that there is time available means that people feel they have more space to consider alternatives and look for lasting solutions to problems. Unexpected problems become challenges rather than disasters. When a team is ahead of schedule and team members work long hours because they are excited, they are choosing to put in that extra time. When the team is behind schedule, team members are often pushed to work long hours to try to catch up. The choice is no longer really theirs.

Fundamentally, being behind schedule means feeling that we don’t have control of the situation and our time. Being ahead of schedule means feeling that we do have control of the situation and our time. The more control we think we have, the more motivated and focused we are. Individuals and teams that feel in control work harder and produce higher quality results than those that feel that they don’t have control. Thus, a team that is ahead tends to pull further ahead and teams that are behind will often tend to fall further behind until the inevitable triaging of incomplete work allows them to declare themselves done.

Going back to the High Performance Cycle, when we complete goals with a burst of effort and blast across the finish line after being triumphantly ahead of the game, we feel a much greater sense of satisfaction and internal reward. The external rewards also tend to be greater in that situation. When we stagger across the finish line after completing the equivalent of the Bataan Death March, we just feel exhausted and relieved. Internal rewards are lower and satisfaction is lower. It’s the first case that really builds high performance.

Build schedules that you can beat with hard work. If you consistently finish with lots of time left, then your goals are not aggressive enough. If you are always falling behind, then you are too aggressive. Pay attention to the feedback that you are getting as you set deadlines and see if you are making them. It takes a certain amount of effort and practice to make your schedules appropriately challenging but not impossible, particularly because we tend to routinely underestimate the difficulty and time requirements of most tasks: just think about Boston’s Big Dig or that latest home remodeling task you still haven’t finished. Remember that you want to start with easy goals so you can experience early successes and quickly move out ahead of the schedule: that will set the tone for the entire project. Starting with success gets momentum on your side.

How can I use event-based schedules to accomplish goals?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

In chapter 9, we talked briefly about the time component of goals. Without a deadline, goals are not seen as particularly important. If we want a sense of urgency around our goals, we need to put a target date on them and we need to have check points along the way to monitor our progress. But if we become overly specific about scheduling every piece of the goal, we find ourselves back in a clock-based schedule, with all the hassle and headaches that entails. One of the problems with a lot of goals is that components are at least somewhat open-ended. It’s one thing to go out and run on the track for an hour; a software design project may not be at a logical halting point after an hour, making it extremely hard to stop and move to the next thing. Instead, we need to treat goals as events, and use events to trigger our goals. We do this by using implementation intentions.

Now, having read chapter 9, you might be thinking, “Are you nuts? Didn’t you just tell us that intentions are not useful?” Well, it’s certainly true that intentions are not goals and should not be confused with goals. However, properly constructed implementation intentions can help us accomplish our goals. Implementation intentions are a way of linking an arbitrary event to a piece of a goal, linking one piece of a goal to another piece, and linking one goal to another. We can even use implementation intentions to link a goal to a break and a particular leisure activity to a goal as a way of making sure that when we stop, we then start up again. One of the biggest advantages of implementation intentions structured into an event-based schedule is that it becomes very easy to develop the habit of executing the steps in order without having to decide what to do next. When we have to think about the next step, that’s when we become the most vulnerable to distraction. Implementation intentions become the metaphorical cotton in the ears that protect us from the siren song of Facebook and other common time sinks.

We’ve already seen how to construct an event-based schedule. To add implementation intentions, or action triggers, we say or note down on paper, “Once I pour my coffe, I will sit down at the computer” and “Once the computer boots up, I will open Chapter 10 and write,” and so forth. By making the connections explicit, we make them more powerful. We “know” exactly what to do when the appropriate trigger occurs. Writing out the schedule helps considerably, since it means we don’t have to actually remember as many things when we’re busy.

Implementation intentions can also be connected to triggers in our environment: “When the coffee cart comes around, I will close the file I’m working on and make the phone call to Bob,” or, “On Wednesday night after dinner I will review the design for the new Tate GPS.” The more specific the implementation intention, the better. Specific triggers are easier to activate. More general triggers are easier to delay: “After dinner, I will…” is more easily put off from dinner to dinner. Sometimes our implementation intentions are conditional or based on an ongoing experience: “Once I find my way home from wherever this stupid Tate GPS took me, I will fire the person who designed it!” (don’t be surprised; he who has a Tate’s is lost).

Any external event can trigger an implementation intention. The best events are those that require no effort on our part to notice. Thus, “When I look at my watch and see that the time is…” is not a good trigger. Looking at a watch requires us to make a conscious effort to remember to do that and then think about the time. It’s better to trigger off something automatic, like the lights dimming or changing color, the mail being delivered, or that annoying guy who never varies his schedule an iota walking by. Since we so often work in environments with artificial lighting, you do want to be careful about using “it’s getting dark outside” as a trigger, unless you can control the lights. Having the lights automatically clicking on is a good trigger, or having software on your computer that changes your screen brightness according to the position of the sun is another. Even reminders on your smartphone can be very effective, although they tend to be more useful when you want to transition activities at a very specific time.

Some people find it helpful to use objects as triggers: “when I see the Perkins file in the morning, I will…” Like having too many goals, too many such triggers will cause confusion rather than triggering the desired behavior. You don’t want to trigger five behaviors and then have to choose. You want one thing to trigger and then it triggers the next thing, and so on.

It’s worth noting that successful athletes use implementation intentions all the time. When a fencer trains to respond to different attacks by their opponent or a judo player to different throws, what they are doing is setting up a very rapid implementation intention. Teams do it as well, although that does take significant practice since several people’s responses must be coordinated. Some athletes will even use implementation intentions to decide ahead of time how they will feel if certain events take place in the competition: “If I find myself down on points, I will be energized, relaxed, and focused,” or, “If another runner passes me, I will imagine a rubber band pulling me forward and snapping me past him.” As silly as some of these intentions may sound, rehearsing them works. The event triggers the feeling or the action.

What is time?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

Perhaps the best definition of time is that it is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop us from trying to do everything at once! Even more unfortunately, this approach triggers that feeling of being rushed and reduces our ability to get things done. It helps, therefore, to view time as a framework within which we organize our tasks and plan out how to accomplish our goals. This means adopting more of an event-based view of time rather than the clock-based (or duration-based) view most of us are accustomed to. In this context, a schedule is a way of organizing and viewing time such that people and resources are in the right places at the right times and flowing from event to event.

What is an event-based view of time?

We are accustomed to scheduling ourselves based on the clock:

7:45 pre-meeting meeting
8:00am Project planning meeting
9:00 am Customer meeting
11:30-12:30 –Lunch
12:30 – 2:00 Work on presentation
2:00 – 4:00 Brainstorming meeting

And so forth through the day and week. We learned this in school and we do it at work. The problem, though, is that a lot of work needs to be done in ways that don’t always lend themselves to such precise structures and many activities are not always totally one hundred percent precise in their start and stop times. When you have to coordinate a great many people and resources, you need to have a more precise, structured approach to time: colleges, for example, have to manage student schedules, room utilization, professor availability, etc. But that structure comes with a lot of overhead, and is not always all that useful. While we don’t want to completely eliminate structured time, we also don’t want to be totally controlled by it.

A recent article in the NY Times discussed joint military training between the United States and Japan. When asked what the most difficult part of the training was, the Japanese commander commented that he was initally put off by the fact that the US Marines did not have a set schedule. Japanese military exercises are conducted with, “the precision of a Tokyo subway.” Eventually, the Japanese commander realized that the American troops had learned through real combat experience that things do not always, or often, go according to plan. Flexibility is essential. Rigidity leads to defeat.

Master of Time and Space

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

Where oh where has my little week gone, where oh where has it gone?

It’s Thursday afternoon and that big project is due at 5pm. There’s no way you can finish it in the time you have available. No problem, you can just go to the time bank. All your life, people have been telling you that it’s important to save time. Well, just like you’ve put away money for a rainy day, you’ve saved quite a lot of time. Now you just need to withdraw some of that time and use it to finish the project.

What do you mean that didn’t work? When you save time, shouldn’t you be able to withdraw it when you need it? Unfortunately, that trick never works. Even Doctor Who, the main character of the popular British science-fiction series about a wandering Time Lord, can’t manage that one. That’s the problem with time: no matter how much we save, it’s never there when we go to make a withdrawal. We all get sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to the hour, and 24 hours in a day. Time passes whether we use it or abuse it. The only choice we have is how we use the time, not whether we use it.

We have so many gadgets now for measuring time: clocks, watches, iPhones, the list goes on and on. But measuring time is not experiencing time: we have thermometers that tell us what the temperature is, but whether we feel warm or cold can depend on many factors other than just the number on that thermometer. 45 degrees in January can feel downright warm, and 55 in July might seem blessedly cool. Time is similar. Our experience of time passing is very different from what the measurement of time might tell us; this is why productivity and time are not the same! While we might measure time by the ticks of a clock or the dropping of grains of sand through an hourglass, we experience time as a series of events. When we have nothing to occupy our brains, time seems to stretch endlessly, each second ticking by with the excrutiating slowness of an overwritten sentence. Watching paint dry is so painful exactly because nothing much is happening. Conversely, when we are engaged in something that fills our brains, time seems to race by. When we look back, though, on a day filled with activity, it often seems like a very long time must have passed. Two people can experience the passage of time in the same situation very differently. Some athletes will view their opponents as moving very rapidly, while other athletes, who trained to manage their perceptions in ways that change their sense of time, will see their opponents apparently moving in slow motion. The second are far more likely to win.

What it boils down to is that we do not experience time or perceive time by the passage of seconds on our watches. We perceive time through the passage of external events: day and night, the waxing and waning of the moon, the changing of the seasons, and so forth. Those who have spent time in a windowless conference room or office may have noticed that feeling of disorientation that occurs when you step out at the end of the day and realize just how much time has passed: working for IBM in the late 1980s, in the winter months I would often arrive at the office before it was light and leave after dark. Spending the day in a windowless office meant that by the end of the day, I felt extremely confused about what time it actually was. Spending the day in an office dealing with a constant barrage of interrupts produces a similar disorienting effect.

At the same time, as it were, how we feel about time can change our perceptions of the world around us. In one classic experiment, divinity students about to give a talk on the Good Samaritan had their sense of time manipulated: while still in their dorm rooms, some of the students received a phone call stating, “Where are you? You were supposed to be in the chapel five minutes ago!” Other students received a phone call stating, “Although we have plenty of time, we’d like everyone in the chapel a few minutes early.”
On the route between the dorm and the chapel was an apparently sick or injured person. Those divinity students who thought they were late went by that person, in many cases without even noticing him lying there. Those who did notice assumed that someone else would take care of it or figured that maybe the person wasn’t that sick, or something. Conversely, those divinity students who thought they had plenty of time were far more likely to notice the sick person and take appropriate action. Feeling rushed reduces our ability to see the world.

Just as our perceptions of time influence our behavior and how effectively we work, pursue goals, and interact with others, the physical space we are in matters as well. Space creates associations and triggers for our behavior; the right space can make us feel safe or in danger, critical or creative. The same space at different times can also trigger different reactions. Fundamentally, we humans are creatures of our environment. We can’t completely ignore our surroundings when looking at organizational psychology and behavior. Rather, we need to understand how space matters and how our interactions with the space around us can serve to reinforce or undermine our organizational culture, narrative, learning, motivation, perceptions of fairness and justice, and goal setting. Even our perceptions of leadership can be affected by how space and time are handled.

The Sign of the Fours

During the month of January, my wife and I were attending parent-teacher conferences for one of our children. We walked into the building and went to sign in at the desk. There, my wife pointed out the odd date on the sign in form. Instead of reading, “1/15/13,” as one might expect given that the month was January, it read, “4/15/13.” Given the freezing temperatures outside, one might be forgiven for assuming that this represented some sort of wishful thinking. In fact, though, closer examination of the sign in sheet revealed that someone earlier in the day had written the date using a stylized number “1,” such that it looked vaguely like a four. Everyone after that simply copied down the date as they saw it written, apparently without giving any thought to the fundamental lack of logic inherent in the situation. In other words, even though it was January, even though it was freezing cold and there was snow on the ground, even though we weren’t even a month past New Year’s Day, even though, in other words, all the data screamed “January,” people were writing April for the date.

Now, if this phenomenon were limited to people signing into meetings, it would be quite unremarkable. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. This sort of automatic pilot behavior happens all too often in businesses. In businesses, though, it’s rarely quite so benign as writing down the wrong date on a form. Rather, it can involve misreading or misunderstanding critical instructions, with results that do not become obvious until much later in the product development cycle.

At one company, engineers assembling a set of medical tools would quickly glance at the notes left by the person who worked on the previous step, and then take the appropriate actions based on those notes. Alas, the “sign of the fours” played in quite frequently: when the notes were ambiguous, people would often interpret them in ways that made no logical sense given the nature of the product or the point in the development cycle.

At another company, a senior person gave a rather bizarre presentation to a client because he was quite convinced that was what he’d been told to do, even though logic would have suggested that just maybe he was misinterpreting his instructions. In a famous example from WWII, a young pilot mistook the humming of the general sitting next to him in the cabin as instructions to raise the landing gear, even though the plane was still racing along the runway. As a result, the plane crashed. Time after time, we’ve all seen people make apparently nonsensical decisions or take actions that appear to make no logical sense simply because they are reacting to the “sign of the fours”; we may even have done it ourselves from time to time.

So what is going on here?

In virtually every one of these situations, the common element is time. “So what?” you might ask. Time, after all, is a common element in every situation. The key, though, is in how we perceive time. When we perceive themselves as being rushed or short on time, we tend to make snap decisions based on whatever is in front of us. That number looks like a four? Okay, write down a four for the month even though it’s January. The general gestured with his hand? Clearly he wants the landing gear up even though we’re still on the ground.

Ironically, this perception of time is often an illusion. We talk all the time about “saving time,” but no matter how much we save, it’s never there when we want to make a withdrawal. Time is money until we actually try to get a refund. We all get sixty minutes to the hour, 24 hours to the day. Nothing we do can change that. The only real decisions we have are how we allocate that time and how much we can get done during the time available to us. Counter-intuitively, the more we try to schedule, cram, and pack our days, the less we actually do: we become more prone to distractions and mistakes. Athletes who feel rushed moved very fast, but lose more often. Athletes who have learned the trick of feeling like they have lots of time tend to win, even in such high speed sports as fencing.

The secret, therefore, is to structure our time so that we don’t feel so rushed. It’s not that we’re changing the amount of time we have, merely how we perceive it. The master fencer perceives time in slow motion, and thus appears to always be in the right place at the right time. Since all of us have a tendency to underestimate how long projects will take, one trick is to change our perception of the deadline by creating a series of challenging, but realistic, deadlines that we can miss and still be ahead of the game. So long as we take our self-imposed deadlines reasonably seriously, we will get a great deal done, yet when we don’t make them, we still feel in control and able to focus. It’s when we feel events rushing down upon us that we become most vulnerable to the “sign of the fours.”

Of course, this whole discussion does beg the question of how many of those people who wrote “4/15/13” instead of “1/15/13” then went rushing off to deal with their income taxes.

Don’t over commit to start the new year!

Why do so many people end up overcommitted at work, in volunteer activities, or socially?

The tendency to say “yes” to any request stems from several sources.

First, most of us like to think of ourselves as the type of person who helps others. Thus, when a friend or colleague (or boss) asks for help, that request immediately triggers us to think, “But if I don’t help, what does that say about me? I’m not <selfish/mean/self-centered/uncaring/etc.” So, we agree to help in order to protect our self-image.

Second, and related, is what’s known as social theater: in certain environments, there are certain role expectations that are taken for granted. Helping others is often one of those expectations. Therefore, when someone asks, we agree almost automatically, without really thinking through the consequences, or even the wisdom, of the decision. Essentially, behaviors that we learned at some point in our lives without really thinking about them become automatic behaviors later when the right trigger presents itself.

Third, many businesses foster a culture of obedience and pressure to always get more done in less time. Although this cultural baggage is ultimately destructive to the business, as it leads to burnout and corner-cutting, in the short-term it appears to be very rewarding. Thus, it gets repeated and hailed as an emblem of the dedication and productivity of the employees. It is, in reality, a sign of a company with relatively low functioning teams: high performance teams know their limits and are willing to stand up for them. Low functioning teams, and the members thereof, routinely bite off more than they can chew.

Fourth, when we over promise and fail to deliver, we frequently assume that the problem lies within us: if we’d just worked harder, if we were just a little more skilled, if we just a little smarter, and so forth. Thus, we become even more determined to “get it right” the next time around. In truth, the problem was not that we weren’t working hard enough, or weren’t smart enough, etc. The problem was that we simply tried to do too much, not some personal failing that can be corrected by working harder.

So how do you prevent this from happening?

There are several techniques, which can be used singly or in combination.

One trick is to identify the thought or image that pops into your head the moment someone asks you for help. It can be hard to catch this, but with a little effort, most people will discover that some image flashed across their brain and that they are reacting to that image instead of the request for help. That image might be a thought about how important it is to help others, or a belief that other person can’t succeed without your help, or an image of being fired for not helping, etc. This is one of those situations where if you ask 99 people to describe their image, you’ll get 99 responses :). Once you catch the image, you can look at it and ask yourself if it’s actually realistic. Do they really need your help that badly? If you’re a productive employee, do you honestly think you’ll get fired for saying “no?”

Another thing to recognize is that boundary testing is a normal part of all relationships: we instinctively attempt to understand our environment, and that includes understanding what we can and cannot expect from the people around us. Not knowing the boundaries is anxiety producing. Children do this sort of boundary testing all the time, and when they don’t find a boundary their behavior only gets worse until they get a reaction. Adults are different only the sophistication (and even that is arguable!) of their boundary testing. Thus, saying “no” is a form of setting boundaries. Setting boundaries actually helps make other people feel more secure because they now know what to expect from you, and also establishes you as a peer of the person making the request. Consider, the only people who are, in our society, nominally prohibited from setting boundaries are children. Children are typically expected to comply with most adult requests (how often did you hear, “When your mother asks, it’s not a request!” when you were growing up?). Thus, it’s important to recognize boundary testing and also recognize that setting limits is beneficial for everyone.

Another approach is to reverse the question: “I’d love to help you, and I’m not sure how I can fit this into my schedule. Let me go through with you what I have to get done over the <time> and you can help me figure it out.” Frequently, people ask for help without realizing the degree of imposition. Going through your constraints and asking them to help you figure out how to fit in their request is often a good technique to get them to realize just how much they are asking of you. If, in the end, you still decide to accept the request, you’ve at least enabled them to recognize just how big a favor they’re asking.

Note that if your boss is making the request, you can still apply this approach, with a slight modification: “I would love to do this, and I’m concerned that if I agree, these other projects will suffer. Please let me know your thoughts on how I should prioritize these different tasks.”

By the way, it can help to block out chunks of time on the calendar representing the total amount of time you expect a task to take (when you estimate how long a task should take, add 25%… most of us underestimate!). Tasks never seem that big when you’re thinking about them abstractly, but when you create a visual representation, you’ll be amazed how much time you’ve allocated.

All right, so  you’re already over-committed, what do you do? The best thing is to take an honest look at your tasks, prioritize, and then start contacting people. You can start with either your lowest priorities or your most recent “Of course I’ll do that!” Either way, you need to say, “I’m sorry. I know I told you I would help you, and I’ve discovered that these prior commitments are going to take much longer than expected.”

No, the other person won’t be happy. However, they will be a lot happier that you told them early on, not at the last minute. The longer you wait, the more painful the conversation becomes, the angrier they’ll be, and the worse you’ll feel. Moreover, you’ll be that much more likely to give in when they start complaining, leaving you feeling overworked and bullied.