What I know about Time Management
Listen, I’ve been talking about this for the majority of two decades now, and the majority of organisations I visit still have their people scrambling like headless chooks. Not long ago, I’m sitting in this impressive office tower in Brisbane’s city centre watching a team leader frantically switch between seventeen different browser tabs while trying to explain why their monthly goals are in tatters. Honestly.
This employee has got multiple devices going off, chat alerts going mental, and he’s genuinely amazed when I suggest maybe just maybe this approach isn’t working. This is 2025, not 1995, yet we’re still treating time management like it’s some mysterious dark art instead of basic workplace hygiene.
What really winds me up. Half the Business owner I meet reckons their people are “inherently messy” or “don’t have the right approach.” Total codswallop. Your team isn’t damaged your systems are. And in most cases, it’s because you’ve never bothered teaching them how to actually handle their time properly.
The Hidden Price of Poor Time Management
Let me tell you about Emma from this creative studio in Brisbane. Talented beyond belief, this one. Could sell ice to Eskimos and had more brilliant concepts than seemed humanly possible. But Christ almighty, seeing her work was like watching a car crash in slow motion.
She’d start her day going through emails for forty five minutes. Then she’d tackle this complex project outline, get partially done, remember she had to phone a client, get sidetracked by a Slack message, start tackling a different campaign, realise she’d overlooked a meeting, dash to that, come back to her desk totally scattered. Rinse and repeat for eight hours straight.
The worst bit? Sarah was working sixty hour weeks and feeling like she was spinning her wheels. Her burnout was obvious, her work standard was all over the place, and she was seriously considering finding another job for something “less demanding.” At the same time, her colleague Mark was cruising through identical projects in regular business hours and always seemed to have time for a proper coffee break.
What’s the difference between them? Dave knew something most people never discover time isn’t something that dictates your schedule, it’s something you take charge of. Simple concept when you think about it, doesn’t it?
The Truth About Effective Time Management
Don’t you start thinking and think I’m about to sell you another software system or some fancy scheduling system, hang on. Real time management isn’t about having the flawless technology or colour coding your schedule like a rainbow exploded.
It’s about understanding three basic principles that most education completely miss:
Rule one Attention isn’t plural. Yeah, I know that’s grammatically dodgy, but listen up. At any point in time, you’ve got a single focus. Not several, not three, only one. The moment you start handling “priorities,” you’ve already lost the plot. Discovered this the tough way running a consultancy back in Adelaide during the infrastructure push. Believed I was being brilliant juggling numerous “important” deadlines simultaneously. Nearly ran the Business completely trying to be everything to everyone.
Rule number two Interruptions aren’t unavoidable, they’re a choice. This is where most local companies get it completely wrong. We’ve built this environment where being “available” and “responsive” means reacting every time someone’s phone dings. Friend, that’s not efficiency, that’s Pavlovian conditioning.
Had a client this law office on the Sunshine Coast where the senior lawyers were bragging that they answered emails within half an hour. Proud! At the same time, their actual work were dropping, client work was taking way longer as it should, and their lawyers looked like extras from The Walking Dead. Once we implemented realistic expectations shock horror both efficiency and service quality went up.
Third Your vitality isn’t steady, so quit acting like it is. This is my particular interest, probably because I spent most of my earlier career trying to ignore fatigue periods with more caffeine. Spoiler alert: doesn’t work.
Some work need you sharp and attentive. Others you can do when you’re half asleep. Yet most people distribute work throughout their day like they’re some sort of work android that runs at full power. Complete madness.
Programs That Deliver Results
Here’s where I’m going to irritate some people. Most time management courses is complete rubbish. There, I said it. It’s either too theoretical all systems and matrices that look pretty on PowerPoint but crumble in the actual workplace or it’s too focused on tools and platforms that become just another thing to manage.
Effective approaches is education that accepts people are complex, workplaces are unpredictable, and flawless processes don’t exist. The best program I’ve ever delivered was for a mob of construction workers in Townsville. These guys didn’t want to know about the Eisenhower Matrix or David Allen’s system.
They wanted usable methods they could implement on a job site where chaos happens every moment.
So we concentrated on three straightforward principles: group like work into blocks, protect your peak energy hours for critical tasks, and learn to refuse commitments without shame about it. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing complicated. Six months later, their project completion rates were up thirty percent, overtime costs had dropped significantly, and worker wellbeing issues had virtually disappeared.
Compare that to this fancy consulting firm in Adelaide that spent serious money on elaborate efficiency platforms and complex workflow processes. A year and a half down the line, half the workforce still wasn’t implementing the tools correctly, and everyone else was spending excessive hours on administrative overhead than actually achieving results.
Where Australian Companies Stuff This Up
It’s not that managers fail to understand the value of effective scheduling. They generally do. The real issue is they treat it as a universal fix. Send everyone to the same training course, hand out uniform solutions, hope for uniform improvements.
Complete rubbish.
I remember this manufacturing Company in Wollongong that hired my services because their floor managers were always running late. The CEO was convinced it was a skills gap get the team managers some organisational training and all problems would disappear.
What we discovered was the real problem was that the executive team kept altering directions suddenly, the scheduling software was about as useful as a chocolate teapot, and the team leaders wasted hours daily in discussions that should have been with a quick conversation.
No amount of efficiency education wasn’t going to address fundamental issues. We ended up overhauling their information systems and creating sensible coordination methods before we even touched individual time management skills.
This is what absolutely frustrates me about so many local companies. They want to address the outcomes without tackling the root cause. Your people can’t manage their time effectively if your organisation doesn’t respect time as a precious commodity.
A Sydney Eye Opener
On the topic of business time awareness, let me tell you about this digital agency in Melbourne that totally shifted my thinking on what’s possible. Small team, maybe twenty people, but they operated with a level of efficiency mindset that put most corporations to shame.
Every meeting had a specific outline and a firm conclusion deadline. People actually came organised instead of treating gatherings as idea workshops. Communication wasn’t managed like texting. And here’s the kicker they had a organisation wide policy that unless it was genuinely urgent, work communications stopped at 6 PM.
Groundbreaking? Not really. But the results were outstanding. Staff efficiency was better than comparable organisations I’d worked with. Staff turnover was virtually non existent. And Customer happiness ratings were through the roof because the output standard was reliably superior.
The CEO’s approach was straightforward: “We hire smart people and rely on them to handle their responsibilities. Our role is to build a workplace where that’s actually possible.”
Compare this to this resource sector business in the Pilbara where supervisors flaunted their excessive hours like badges of honour, meetings ran over schedule as a standard practice, and “urgent” was the default status for everything. Despite having considerably larger budgets than the tech Company, their per employee productivity was roughly half.
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