Nutshell: It’s about time: how to find the space for learning

Mastering three simple techniques will help us to find the time for — and develop the habit of — regular, effective study.

Journalist and author Oliver Burkeman is not one to shy away from being contrarian. And he has plenty of things to say about one the challenges we all face in today’s fast-moving, always-on world: how we can keep our heads above water when there are so many calls on our time.

He believes that “the quest for increased personal productivity – for making the best possible use of our limited time – is a dominant motif of our age.” And, for Burkeman, that quest is not a positive one.

Sound familiar? At work, at home, with our colleagues, family and friends, there always seems to be so much to do. We may find ourselves ping-ponging from task to task and commitment to commitment with little or no time to take stock.

Worse, Burkeman believes that the very time management techniques that have been developed to help us make tough decisions about how we spend our precious time can actually make things worse. They can loom large to such an extent that, rather than offering a solution, they become part of the problem: “More often than not, techniques designed to enhance one’s personal productivity seem to exacerbate the very anxieties they were meant to allay.”

As you embark on this course of study, the challenge of carving out enough time to get everything done is most likely looming large for you too.

So, what to do?

Burkeman’s thesis is seductive. Spending even more time thinking about how to spend our time may seem counter-intuitive but it’s crucial. The fact remains, though, that you will need to find the space – and the will – to make study part of your routine and schedule, and this can be hard.

Not everyone sees time management as a burden. Research by a team at Concordia University has led to some interesting conclusions. By looking at a range of cross-disciplinary studies over a period of more than 30 years, they concluded that the true value of good time management is not really about enhanced performance at work. Rather, its biggest impact is on our wellbeing, in particular, life satisfaction and lower levels of distress and anxiety.

Maybe, then, as you plan for your learning, you might take into account three techniques that will help you to make time for, and commit to, your study – without feeling a sense of Burkeman-style overwhelm.

Prioritise, prioritise

Choosing how we spend our time is about prioritisation. It can be tricky, because it means we have to make decisions, choices about what’s important now and what can be done later, differently – or not at all. It’s about being prepared to say “no” to some things and “yes” to others, reconciling ourselves to the potential FOMO caused by letting go of some things in the service of a particular goal. We may know that we should spend a few hours studying, but it’s hard to ignore the relentless siren call of Outlook.

Faced with these choices, we may feel so overwhelmed by the range of options on offer that we suffer from decision paralysis, unable to fix on any solution or course of action or doing something half-heartedly with half an eye on something else at the same time.

We may fall prey to planning fallacy, leading us to make unrealistic assumptions about how long everything will take. We may find ourselves firefighting instead of following even well-laid plans. And, because we’re human, our cognitive biases will also get in the way, making us focus on the trivial rather than the important; look for perfection rather than just getting on with something; settle for short-term wins (replying to emails) rather than focus on the big prize (completing this course of study).

But while the cognitive odds might be stacked against us, all is not lost.

The Eisenhower Matrix

Taking a leaf out of the book of an ex-US president and the supreme commander of the allied forces in Europe during the Second World War might not be a bad place to start. In a 1954 speech, Dwight D Eisenhower gave us an insight into how he organised his workload with the quote: “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

In essence, this is what we now call the Eisenhower Principle, the basis of the Eisenhower Matrix.

Also known as the Urgent–Important Matrix, the two-by-two grid helps us to decide on and prioritise tasks by urgency and importance, sorting out less urgent and important tasks which we should either delegate or not do at all. Prioritising tasks by urgency and importance results in four quadrants with different strategies.

The first quadrant identifies ‘do first’ tasks, those important and urgent tasks that we need to do ourselves, and we should just get out of the way. However, this assumes that we understand what truly constitutes ‘important’ and ‘urgent’ – and the difference between the two terms.

According to author Stephen Covey, urgency relates to a task that demands immediate attention, while importance has to do with an outcome that contributes to an individual’s mission, values and high-priority goals – such as studying.

Important tasks are often associated with our own goals (rather than other people’s) and have clear value. Their time-sensitivity may be indicated by the level of discomfort we feel when we contemplate them; a sense of anxiety and dread might mean we have put them off for too long already. Sudden crises and incoming tasks demanding an immediate response often knock us off course, so it’s important to set deadlines for our own priorities, even when they are not formally required.

Without these, we might forever delay important things in favour of perpetually putting out fires.

Which brings us to the second quadrant: for tasks that are important but less urgent, and can be scheduled for action at an appropriate time. If we’re up and running with a good time management regime, most of our work will be carried out here: anticipated and planned for. This quadrant is crucial, and we need to plan for and ringfence the time we spend here. For example, on this programme, we may identify that we need to do around 7.5 hours of learning each week. If we schedule this effectively and protect that time – whatever else is going on around us – then we’ll be much more likely to follow through.

The other two quadrants are about making more time available for us to do that planning and acting. The third quadrant is for those tasks we can outsource or delegate. They’re still pretty urgent, but they can be carried out by others.

Research by academics Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen found that knowledge workers spend an average of 41% of their time on discretionary activities that offer little personal satisfaction and could be handled competently by others. If we’re to find the time to study, we need to think about the things that we do – and make a judgement about anything that could just as well be done by others. That might mean delegating a work task to a keen junior colleague or thinking about how we organise our life outside work.

The fourth and final quadrant is titled 'don’t do’ and is there to remind us that there are some things we shouldn’t be doing at all. There’s likely to be a big overlap here with some of the distractions we might be looking to overcome; things that take away from our goals rather than moving us towards them.

One way to use the Eisenhower Matrix is to combine it with an audit of how you spend your time in any given week. Note down not how you think you spend your time, but how you actually do. Then use this analysis to plot the things you do against the matrix, sifting activity into the four quadrants. You may be surprised at the results.

Timing matters

We probably know instinctively when we do our best work, whether we focus and achieve most before everyone else is up and about or whether we’re likely to be burning the midnight oil for best effect.

According to author Daniel Pink, these are instincts we should trust. In his book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink introduces us to the science that proves that when we do something can be as important as what we do: chronobiology. Timing, it seems, can make all the different when it comes to getting things done.

Chronobiology is the study of our natural daily physiological rhythms. Pink calls it the ‘hidden pattern of the day’. It affects our mood, energy, cognitive abilities and, ultimately, our performance, revolving around three stages:

• Peak: our mood rises – best for deep-focus analytical work, requiring mental alertness – such as studying.

• Trough: our mood declines – suitable for simple administrative tasks such as answering emails.

• Recovery: our mood picks up – ideal for work that involves mental ‘looseness’, such as insight and creativity – considering ‘the bigger picture’.

Our own peak/trough/recovery cycle varies according to our specific chronotype. And this has a big impact on how productive we can be at different times of the day.

With his characteristic turn of phrase, Pink broadly divides people into three main chronotypes:

• Larks: morning people who peak in the morning

• Owls: evening people who peak in the evening

• Third Birds: somewhere in between

Approximately two-thirds of us fall into the ‘third bird’ category, while around 20% are owls and 15% larks.

We can work out our own chronology type by simply asking ourselves:

• What time do we usually go to bed when we’re on holiday – or when we have nothing much to do the next day?

• What time do we usually wake up on those days?

• What is the midpoint between those two times?

For example, if we normally go to bed at 2am and wake up at 10am, our midpoint is 6am.

• If our midpoint of sleep is 3.30am or earlier, we’re a lark.

• If our midpoint of sleep is 5.30am or later, we’re an owl.

• If our midpoint is somewhere in between, we’re a third bird.

While the traditional working day is more suited to larks and third birds than it is to the fifth of the population who are owls, we have more leeway about when we choose to study – which can help those midnight-oil burners. The trick is to acknowledge when we’re most productive and play to our strengths when we’re planning learning schedules.

In short, for the majority of us, as a rough rule, 9am-12pm should be spent on cognitively taxing, analytical work, 12-3pm should be spent on administrative work or in procedural meetings and 3-5.30pm should be spent on creative or big picture projects.

Motivation vs intention

So, we’ve explored ways to prioritise our learning, and worked out how we can use chronobiology to study at the optimum time for us. Now, though, we just need to get on with it. We might think that’s simply a matter of motivation: we want to study, so we’ll study. But we might also want to be fitter, but that doesn’t mean we’re putting our gym membership to full use.

Author James Clear believes that simply being motivated to do something is not enough, and that we need to get into the habit of doing something to make it stick.

He reports on research which showed that the simple act of making a plan - “During the next week, I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on [DAY] at [TIME] in [PLACE]” – made it much more likely that the people involved would meet their goal, in this case exercising at least once a week.

This kind of planning is known as an implementation intention. Clear argues that what we need to achieve a goal is not more motivation, but more clarity. It’s that clarity that will make things such as regular study a more natural habit.

Journalist and author Charles Duhigg agrees. When he was researching his book The Power of Habit he found that diagnosing the reasons why he’d fallen into a less positive habit – eating a cookie every afternoon – gave him insight into how he could turn that automatic response into something that could change his behaviour where sheer force of willpower had failed.

Duhigg’s habit loop is a simple way to help us understand how habits – both good and bad – can become entrenched behaviours.

It’s a simple model which identifies the relationship between a cue or prompt (what triggers our habit), how we react (the routine) and what our perceived reward or goal for that routine may be.

By interrogating each step of the loop using a four-stage plan, Duhigg was able to:

1. Understand his routine – the cookie-eating behaviour he wanted to change.

2. Think carefully about the reward he really wanted. When it came down to it, this was not about the cookie per se, but about the chance to gossip with his colleagues.

3. He was then able to isolate the cues that so often trigger our routines: time and location. By mid-afternoon every day, he was ready to leave his office for some social interaction in a different space.

4. Armed with this knowledge, Duhigg could move to the fourth and final stage: shifting his behaviour by planning for the cue and delivering the reward he wanted without eating a cookie along the way.

Because habits are basically a formula our brain follows automatically:

When I see CUE, I will do ROUTINE in order to get a REWARD

Duhigg was able to reframe his cookie habit loop with the following plan:

At 3.30pm every day, I will walk to a friend’s desk and chat for 10 minutes.

It seems quite a simple shift, but it worked. It had become a new habit. Rather than relying on willpower alone, having a plan helped Duhigg to achieve his real goal: doing something productive when his attention was at a particular low point.

If-then planning

Duhigg’s is a graphic example of how we can all achieve the goals or rewards we want – such as finding time to study for this programme – by putting in place some simple planning to embed what psychologist Peter Gollwitzer calls “instant habits”.

In the 1990s Gollwitzer developed his implementation intention technique – better known as if-then planning. Just like Duhigg’s cue-routine-reward loop, it’s a way of helping us to harness a particular cue to trigger a behaviour or action that will help us towards our goal without having to rely just on willpower or motivation.

‘If-then’ cues are usually expressed in terms of:

If [a situation occurs] then I will [behave in a particular way]. 

Gollwitzer’s theory is based on the habit-forming technique of identifying the when [if] and how [then] so that we’ll be more likely to take actions that support our goals.

By encoding information in 'if X, then Y' terms and using these connections to guide our behaviour (often unconsciously), we can identify triggers (cues) to help us take the action we want to take.

In practical terms, we need to:

1. Select a goal. 

For example, successfully completing this qualification.

2. Identify the single action (the ‘then’, Duhigg’s routine) that we’ll focus on to meet our goal. 

For example, studying regularly.

3. Identify a specific cue for the action (the ‘if’).

For example, identifying a specific time and/or place that is conducive to study.

4. Practise it so that the cue becomes a subconscious trigger for action.

For example, a regular routine that will help us to embed good study habits.

As a result, we might create if-then statements like:

“If it’s Monday between 9am and 12pm or Friday between 2pm and 5pm, then I’ll make space at the kitchen table and dedicate time to working on my Transformational Leadership Programme of study.”

OR

“If I see a learning event or Review in the diary from the Future Talent Learning team, then I’ll prioritise that and reschedule other meetings.”

Be specific

Being specific and intentional is key to if-then planning. Nebulous plans, such as “don’t spend too long on emails” or “study more”, simply won’t work, because we won’t create the automatic link (the habit) we need to make us more likely to act. We’ll be relying instead on limited reserves of willpower or motivation. 

Precise, clear implementation intentions replace that willpower with an established, pre-determined plan of action, for example:  

“If it’s between 3 and 5pm on a Monday, then I’ll turn off social media notifications so as not to get distracted.” 

We can also use them to anticipate things that might derail us, for example:

“If it’s too noisy for me to study in the office, then I’ll go to my local library/coffee shop where I can concentrate better”.

or to reframe and counter our cognitive biases, for example:

“If I find myself catastrophising about never completing my course, then I’ll remind myself of the progress I’ve already made and the plan I have in place to keep studying. If this doesn’t help, then I’ll arrange a catch-up call with my coach.”

When – like Duhigg – we plan for when and where we will perform a new habit, we’re much more likely to follow through. A clear implementation intention helps us to act without having to dither about whether or not to do so, helping us to avoid the twin perils of procrastination and unhealthy distraction.

When it’s hard to find the time – or motivation – to study regularly, implementation intentions show us that it’s best to plan for exactly when and how we’re going to act in ways that will help to make them a reality. By creating if-then plans, we no longer have to rely just on willpower or motivation, but can create those habits that will support our goals.

Oliver Burkeman is right about the need to protect ourselves from a personal productivity culture that makes us even more anxious and uncertain about the things we have to do. But when we learn to focus on the things that really matter to us and how (and when) to find the time to do them, and create simple habits that make them a more routine part of our lives, the chances are that we’ll be boosting our wellbeing rather than depleting it.

As you prepare to study on this FT Learning programme, these three simple techniques might make all the difference.