Productivity Myth: Hourly Schedules keep your day on track!

Today I am continuing with my Productivity Myths series where I explain why some common productivity advice isn’t accurate and uncover the truth hidden beneath the myth so you can actually improve your productivity!

Productivity Myth #3: Hourly schedules keep your day on track!

It seems like pretty basic planning and productivity advice, doesn’t it? Even many planners come designed with hourly grids where you are encouraged to map out, hour-by-hour the tasks of your day. It reminds me of a quote “a place for everything and everything in it’s place” but twist that to “a time for everything and everything in time.” In a different world, where things always run smoothly and best laid plans come to fruition, an hourly schedule does seem like the perfect solution for planning your day. But, alas, over time I have come to recognize how this seemingly sound advice can wreak havoc when put into practice.

Now, I do want to provide a disclaimer to this information and say I recognize that in some cases, using an hourly schedule is necessary for the work that some of us do. Many businesses work on an hourly appointment schedule for very good reason, and I am not suggesting that this practice should end. I’ll expound on the situations where using an hourly schedule does work a little later on. What I am suggesting with this information, however, is that for those of us with more control over how we spend our time, there are significant reasons why hourly schedules are problematic to overall productivity.

First, let me explain the productivity science behind why using an hourly schedule may seem to work. There is an axiom in productivity known as Parkinson’s Law. It states that “work expands to fill the time allotted for its’ completion.” In common language this means that no matter how much time you give yourself to work on a task, it will take you that long to complete it. Now, in the past, I often took this axiom to also mean that work contracts to fill the time allotted for its’ completion. Meaning that if you give yourself less time to complete an objective, you will also accomplish it in that time as well. However, I have come to realize that this is not true for objectives across the board. Yes, if I give myself 15 minutes to clean my kitchen I can get a decent job done by speeding up my actions that I might usually do at a more relaxed pace in 30 minutes. Or, I might do a decent job but skip over some actions or lessen the quality of the work I am doing to some extent.

Now, cleaning my kitchen is one situation where my adaptation of Parkinson’s Law works well enough, but there are plenty of other examples where it fails. For example, if I am traveling by car to visit a family member in another state, this may be a trip that takes me 90 minutes on average. Now, if I gave myself a time frame of 120 minutes, by Parkinson’s Law, it may very well take me 120 minutes because I might stop at a rest area or for a snack or gas on my way to my destination. However, I cannot expect to be at my destination in 30 minutes or even 60 minutes because the laws of physics and the state of New Jersey say I cannot legally travel by car and reach my destination in such a short period of time. In some respects I believe that the concept of Parkinson’s Law shows how making a realistic schedule and sticking to it can work for completing objectives, however, it doesn’t really work when trying to limit time spent on tasks. In addition, it pretty much ignores some of the most common issues that interfere with productivity when using the model of an hourly schedule to manage your objectives.

So, next I want to lay out a few of the most common issues that arise when using an hourly schedule. If you have ever tried and failed to stick to one, you might recognize a few of these yourself from personal experience.

The most common issue I see with using an hourly schedule for your day is that many people have a difficult time carving out the proper amount of time to alot to an activity. If you have ever tried an hourly schedule and assigned tasks to a specific time slot, you likely faced the scenario where your tasks were taking longer than originally expected and although you were working diligently on your tasks, you started falling behind. Unfortunately, many people are just very bad guessers when it comes to assuming how much time something will take. It’s a default for many of us to assume something will get done quicker than is realistically possible. Even (and sometimes even especially) when we know we have completed a task before in the past. How often have you said to yourself “oh, I’ll do this now, it will only take 15 minutes,” but by the time you wrap up 40 minutes has elapsed? When it comes to time, hindsight is not 20/20 and unless you have specifically tracked and measured your time for various activities in the past, more often than not, you remember it taking less time than it really did.

The second most common issue people face when using an hourly schedule is that unexpected issues or distractions often pop up during the day and divert our attention away from our schedules, again throwing us off track. I think the concept of distractions keeping us from our work is something we are all familiar with and understand how that negatively impacts productivity, so let’s focus on unexpected issues. Unexpected issues can take the form of changes to our planned tasks, technical or communication issues that halt the flow of our work, or people/processes we need to work with or through to complete our work. These aspects are the most unpredictable part of creating a schedule because no matter how diligently we work towards our objectives, in many scenarios other factors can keep us from being productive and staying on track.

The third and final common issue people face when using an hourly schedule is that they ignore or fail to account for their personal energy cycles. People are not robots. Even if we know the precise amount of time our tasks will take and can ensure we are in a distraction and problem-free environment, it is still hard for us to stick to a schedule because working back to back on tasks is mentally exhausting and mental energy is a difficult factor to plan for. Each of us has an amount of energy we begin the day with and that energy cycles in highs and lows that most of us are not attuned to. Sometimes, work just drains us and this results in a slowing of our rate of productivity that again throws us off schedule. Yes, sometimes coffee can help us power through it, but that affect is usually only temporary.

Next, I’d like to explain one lesser recognized issue when it comes to using hourly schedules, but one that I am extremely mindful of, and that is the fact that hourly schedules prevent us from going with the flow of least resistance in our work. The way I look at the previous three common issues to using an hourly schedule is that they each represent a different form of common resistance that throws us off our well laid plans. This is an indication to me that the plans, however, were not well laid. Yet, people will continue to push through, clinging to their schedule, trying very hard to stick to it and then feeling overwhelmed and dissatisfied when they fail to achieve the plan. For me, when I approach my work, I see my objectives as outcomes I would like to manifest and so I prefer to go with the flow and not hold too tightly onto my own expectations or plans for how something should go in order to be completed. Although in many cases with our tasks, our reasonable expectations will be fulfilled, that’s not because things can only work out one way. Objectives can be met and outcomes can come to fruition in a myriad of ways, so when we try to stick to our plan as though its the only way forward, we usually prevent ourselves from meeting our objectives in the easiest way.

This is where I will insert my favorite productivity example of playing a game of chess to illustrate the point for you. In chess the objective is to capture your opponents King piece. Games of chess can last hours or even days between two players matched in skill making countless moves across the board, but a chess master can also win the game against a lesser skilled player within a matter of just a handful of moves. Think of your daily schedule or plans as those games of chess. Most of us start our day with a strategy that involves many moves and through our days sticking to this plan we can hit roadblocks that cause us to have to make even more moves to get to our desired outcome. But, in reality, there is a path you can take where you only have to make a few key moves to reach your objectives. It’s the Pareto Principle, 80% of our results come from 20% of our actions. So my suggestion to you is that using an hourly schedule is like playing a long game a chess, when you might actually be able to use a different strategy with far less effort to reach the same ends.

Now, I don’t want this article to be all negative, because as I stated earlier, there are situations where using an hourly schedule works, and I think we can learn from these situations how to best use an hour schedule to manage our tasks and objectives productively.

I think the best example of when an hourly schedule works is with an appointment based time management model. So visiting the doctor, getting a service done or having a call or meeting. When your work requires you to achieve a certain number of daily objectives, like sales calls or patient visits, mapping out an hourly schedule and working with clients within that window is a great way to put that reverse principle of Parkinson’s Law in place. The key here is that the limit or expectation is agreed upon by all parties and that a regular routine of service is fulfilled. I guess we can all have a laugh about expectations at the doctors office as in some instances our appointment window isn’t always honored, but for other professional services or customer calls the system works because their is an expected process to follow that from experience has very little deviation. So essentially, when your task or objective follows a script or prescribed system or process, it’s okay to use an hourly schedule for time management as long as other factors like interruptions can be minimized or prevented.

So I hope you can see now why I do not use hourly schedules on a daily basis for myself and I don’t normally recommend them to others. Moving forward I hope you will use this information to help you more adequately evaluate factors that hold back your productivity and keep you from executing on your objectives. Think about paying closer attention to or even tracking the time it takes you to complete tasks so you clearly understand the time expectations of your work. Notice the types of issues that pop up when you work on different objectives to help you better anticipate drains on your time the next time you complete those tasks. Most of all, I hope you will start to notice the patterns in your own mental energy while you work to understand how your energy cycles throughout the day. Each of these areas will help you understand yourself and how to maximize your productivity in the future, bringing you close to becoming the master of your productivity game.

I hope this information has been insightful to you and helps you to master your productivity game. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic and how you are using this information to benefit your life! So, please do leave me a comment below!

xoxo,