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All you need to know about Time Intelligence in 5 minutes
23 November 2023
Want to overcome resourcing constraints, meeting overload, employee burnout? In the time it'll take you to enjoy a cuppa, these 10 Q&As tell you how.
What’s the problem? Why do we need time intelligence?
We work long hours yet our productivity levels are not what they could be. The incidence of stress and mental ill-health has been rising steadily, costing employers and health services billions every year. And as organisations are failing to meet the needs of different groups of employees, they are making glacial progress towards their diversity goals. The answer isn’t to exhort people to work faster or harder or smarter: it’s the system we need to fix. We need to create more sustainable, inclusive, productive organisations and ways of working that will allow all kinds of talent to flourish.
What is time intelligence?
Time intelligence is our collective ability to notice how we’re spending our time at work and to make thoughtful decisions about how we invest our many hours of work so that we get a better return on that time investment, for ourselves, our clients, the businesses we work for and indeed the people who are important to us outside of work.
Time intelligence offers a framework and language to help people explore and understand their work culture, ways of working and organisational or team set-up so they can figure out how to improve these to boost both their own performance and enjoyment of work and the business’ performance.
How is time intelligence different to traditional time management?
Traditional time management focuses almost exclusively on efficiency – doing things faster, wasting less time, getting more done within the time available. It’s also very task-focused and aimed solely at the individual – think of it as helping us to spin ever faster on our hamster wheels! Time intelligence is still about doing things efficiently but it’s also about our experience of work and the human, social dimension as much as the task, so that we can slow down our hamster wheels, change course or even step off occasionally. Because our working time is highly interdependent and we don’t work in isolated bubbles, time intelligence is primarily aimed at whole teams and organisations, not just individuals.
What are the warning signs that tell me we need to focus on our time intelligence?
How do you create more time intelligent organisations?
Ideally you start at the top, by getting time intelligence on your leadership agenda and defining as a leadership team what time intelligent ways of working look like for your business and the outcomes you’re seeking. Then you engage other teams in a similar conversation through interactive sessions to help them identify changes within their control that will help them work smarter not harder whilst building on all the positive things they like about working there. Broader issues or opportunities outside of their direct control are fed back to the leadership team.
After this initial stage, you will likely have identified a number of organisation-wide changes to implement so the next stage is to set up these pilots with selected teams, support them and evaluate the benefits afterwards. At a team level, you can help each team to develop a Team Time Contract
which is an informal agreement about how they’ll manage their time across the team. Throughout this process you may want to offer 1:1 support to certain individuals in key roles or who may be in need of additional help for a while to deal with time pressure or manage their workloads.
Who is time intelligence for?
Time intelligence is a mindset and a set of skills that’s for leadership teams, project/functional teams and whole organisations to apply. But you can grow your time intelligence as an individual too and on my group coaching programmes and in my 1:1 coaching sessions I help people do exactly that.
Can you give me some examples of time intelligence in action?
In The Future of Time
I set out the 6 traits of time-intelligent teams and organisations, these are:
2. They minimise distractions and help people focus on the important work
3. They create healthy habits and environments that enable people to do their best work.
4. They recruit, manage, develop and reward people in a way that encourages best use of time
5. They value humanity, social cohesion and wellbeing and work to reduce cognitive overload, burnout and loneliness.
6. They prize experimentation, learning and open-mindedness.
The book also offer 24 ‘time solutions’ which are examples of things time-intelligent organisations do day-to-day. For a preview of the book’s index and first few pages, click here. When I work with clients, the actions vary significantly depending on their context, ambition and challenges. We might do some cross-team process mapping to clarify work handovers and deadlines; we might look afresh at the meeting culture and/or introduce organisation-wide meeting-free windows or days; or we might look to formalise ‘deep thinking’ time or informal learning time.
How can we measure our time intelligence?
What can I do tomorrow to engage people in a conversation about this?
1. What helps or hinders you from making the most of your time at work?
2. What doesn't appear in your work calendar that you would like to see in there?
3. How can I help you free up your time to focus on the important work?
If you’re finding it hard to persuade people back into the office in a regular rhythm, you could ask them what makes office time rewarding and useful, and use these insights to tailor your firm-wide working policies.
If I haven’t got a budget to spend on external support, what free resources can I access?
If you’re facing some of the challenges I’ve described above and think you could do with a bit more ‘time intelligence’ to help your teams thrive and your business to perform better, then book a free half hour call with me and let's chat.
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How to encourage this in a way that works for your business. There is a real and urgent need to address the creeping norm of employees working all hours, being contactable and available all the time. But Labour’s recent abandoning of a legal ‘right to disconnect’ in favour of a voluntary code of practice is probably the right move, in my humble opinion. Here are 5 reasons why, 5 ways to make switching off a win/win for you and your organisation, and 5 positive actions to put into practice now. Why legislation is too blunt a tool: Heavy-handed legislation will probably antagonise businesses, not secure their support. There's more to do first to spotlight organisations that are managing the boundaries well between working & non-working time well and proving the business benefits. It’s too early to say confidently how well similar legislation has worked abroad. Australia only adopted this last month; the longer-standing fine-based approach in France and Portugal isn't proven as an effective deterrent. Human-centred organisations are probably already paying attention to this, being creative about work boundaries and using their approach to enhance their employer brand. They'll be the ones who proactively adopt the code of practice and make it genuinely part of ‘the way we work here’ - and they'll win at attracting and retaining talented people longer-term as a result. ‘But clients will go elsewhere’. This is the defence I often hear in rejection of proposals like the right to disconnect. No, client won't IF you engage them in the change and show them that it means they get to access your sharpest minds working at their best,. When organisations see their early-adopter competitors living the code and still winning & keeping desirable clients - and nabbing theirs - they’ll swiftly follow suit. Let’s be clear: some people will continue to say yes to high pay/exciting work in return for ‘you’ll work whenever when we need you ‘. But it’ll be a transactional relationship lasting for as long as it benefits the individual (or employer) and no longer. Easy come, easy go. If that’s your philosophy as an employer: own it and be transparent. Don’t sign the code and pay it lip service. If yours IS an organisation that wants to do better at encouraging employees to switch off, try: 1. Using Labour’s shift to open up conversations at work about pressures to communicate or be available after hours. 2. Adding ‘we support the right to disconnect’ in your recruitment material and having examples to share with candidates during interviews. 3. Supporting selected managers and their teams to trial different experiments around switching off. 4. Asking people ‘how can we help you do to your best work within your normal working hours?’. ‘What gets in the way of this?’. 5. Setting up an industry-wide collaboration to trial different ways of achieving the same outcome. Asynchronous and flexible working are here to stay and bring many benefits to individuals and their employers. But they can make it a challenge to co-ordinate and communicate within teams and across time zones. Here's what you can do personally to uphold the right to switch off and respect other people's non-working time: Add an email footer like: 'I'm sending this now because it suits me but I'm not expecting a response outside of normal working hours'. Work offline if you're working late evenings or weekends, so you're not visible on Teams/whatever channels you use, and schedule your emails to send the next day to avoid the ripple effect of people responding immediately. If people on your team have repeatedly worked late or sacrificed home lives to help reach a deadline, then give them some time back straight afterwards. It's simple and effective. If you're a manager, find out people's preferences around being contacted - or not - during out of hours or when on leave. Everyone's different, so make it your job to know. See annual leave as an opportunity for a colleague to step up and have some stretch experience by covering for you, with support beforehand. Then switch off properly and don't muddy the water by dipping in and out unasked. Listen to my podcast conversation with Ben Higgins, Global CHRO of Wholesale Banking at Societe Generale, about how he does this. These examples are about applying #timeintelligence. If you want to know more about my #timeintelligence sessions for leaders, teams and individuals, get in touch . And if you're making good progress in your organisation on switching off - or at least trialling a few changes - then I'd love to hear more. During normal working hours, of course.
Managing the school holiday juggle and announcing book 2!
What does it cost us to be always rushing ahead? What are we missing by not pausing to look back?
When sticking stops. A barn owl perched observantly on a post in front of me, a heron gliding by like a feathered Concorde with its wings tucked in. Just two of the birds I’ve spotted today whilst working at UK’s only family-owned and managed National Nature Reserve, at Elmley in Kent. I’m not working in the sense of checking on wildlife and mending fences, I’m working in the sense of enjoying an indulgent writing retreat in glorious isolation, tucked away in a definitely-not-roughing-it wooden cabin complete with outdoor tub overlooking meadows and marshes (more pics here ). This retreat is both a long-anticipated birthday gift from my family and the official starting point for writing my second business book. It’s been brewing in my head for months and is now begging loudly to be given some proper love and attention. So here I am, off-grid in every sense with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do for 24 hours than plan and write. Write what? I hear you ask…
What does time off mean to you? How well do you 'not work'?
I waved a Minion off to school yesterday for World Book Day. At least my 12 year old daughter now sorts out her own WBD outfit thank goodness, and there’s now another 364 days before WBD rolls around again. But we’re not done for this week because it's International Women’s Day today! In recognition of this global celebration of women’s contribution to work and society, every day this week I’ve been sharing a statistic on Linked In that describes how women are impacted by our 'time culture' at work. If ‘time culture’ is a new expression to you a) you obviously haven’t read my award-winning business book The Future of Time yet and b) it means our attitudes, behaviours and expectations around the way we spend our time at work. What gets valued and rewarded, what doesn’t. What we spend much of our time on, what we don’t spend so much time on (but ought to). Because surprise, surprise, women are disadvantaged by our ‘time culture’ in several ways. Here are my top five.