Reading a claim about your time

This is the last lesson, and it is the one you'll use longest.

Everything before it was about your own hours. This one is about the claims other people will make about them, and there'll be a great many: in a book somebody gives you, in a training session at work, in an article with a confident number in the headline.

Three habits, and then the course closes on the measurement it opened with.

Habit one: sort the claim before you argue with it

Almost every piece of advice about time is one of three things, and telling them apart takes about thirty seconds once you've done it twice.

Measurable. It makes a claim a study could check, whether or not one has. "Writing a plan the night before makes you more likely to finish what you planned." Somebody could run that, and the useful question is whether anybody has.

Unmeasurable as stated. It uses a term nobody has defined, so no study could settle it either way. "Focus on what really matters." This is not the same as false, and it isn't automatically useless; it may be good advice. It is simply not the kind of sentence evidence can bear on until somebody says what the words mean.

False. It makes a checkable claim that has been checked and did not hold. There are fewer of these than you'd expect, because most of the genre's claims never get near enough to a measurement to be wrong.

This is Digital Literacy lesson 8's move and Using AI Effectively lesson 11's, adapted again, and the course says so rather than presenting it as new. What changes here is the subject and one wrinkle, which is the fourth category the sort keeps producing.

Worked: four pieces of advice, sorted

These four are constructed for the exercise,⁴ assembled from the shapes this kind of advice usually takes rather than quoted from anybody.

"Check email twice a day rather than continuously." Measurable, and specifically so. You could randomise people to the two conditions and measure what they get done and how they feel. What the sort gets you is not a verdict, it's a question with an address: has anybody run this, and on whom? This course has not read a study of it, which is a fact about this course and is not one about the advice.

"Protect your deep work." Unmeasurable as stated, because "deep work" is a category the sentence doesn't define and "protect" is not an action. Lesson 5 gives you a sharper form of the same idea, which is that a long stretch is partly a thing that happens to you and depends on what other people can see. That sharper form is labelled there as the course's own reading rather than a finding of the study, and it keeps that label here. Notice that sharpening it made it measurable, and that's generally what happens: the unmeasurable ones are usually a measurable claim with the specifics removed.

"An interruption costs you twenty-three minutes." False as usually stated, or at least unsupported in a way that has been checked. Lesson 5 traced it: absent from what this course read of both papers it is attributed to, and no primary printed source found by somebody who went looking across five papers and twenty-three posts.

"Successful people get up at five." Two claims stuck together, which is the fourth category and the commonest one in this genre. Claim one: successful people rise early. Measurable, once somebody defines "successful", and worth asking about. Claim two, carried in the word order and never stated: rising early is why. That is a causal claim, and the sentence supplies nothing that could support it.

Separating the two is most of the work, and it is what the rest of this section is for. An unsupported causal claim riding on a measurable descriptive one is the standard shape of advice in this subject.

Habit two: trace the number

A figure is easier to check than an argument, which is the whole reason this habit is worth having. You do not need to evaluate the reasoning. You just follow the citation.

Lesson 5 did one of these in full and this lesson will not repeat it. What it does instead is the question lesson 5 left: why does this particular subject produce so many unsourced numbers?

Three reasons, and the third is the one you can act on. This is the course's reasoning rather than a finding, and no study read for this course tests any part of it.⁴

A memorable figure travels better than a study. "Twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds" is specific, surprising and easy to say. The finding it's displaced, that most interrupted work is resumed the same day but with more than two intervening activities, is none of those things. Precision to the second is doing rhetorical work here rather than measuring anything, and the tell is that wherever this course has met it, it arrives without a page number.

A claim circulates inside the genre rather than back to the literature. This course has not read the trade books and cannot count their citations, so take this as the shape it's able to see rather than as a survey: a figure enters once, and each repetition inherits its authority from the last rather than from any study. That is not dishonesty; it's what happens when a subject is written mostly by practitioners for practitioners.

And nobody checks, because checking looks like more work than it is. This is the actionable one. The trace in lesson 5 covered five papers and twenty-three blog posts. Your own version takes twenty minutes, most trails end after two steps, and the number of times you will need to do it before you stop believing unsourced figures is about one.

Parkinson's law, which is not a law

Lesson 7 gave you the short form of this one. Here is the whole of what the course can establish.

The most quoted sentence in this whole subject is that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

This course has not read the essay it comes from. The full text sits behind a paywall and the copies found were unreachable, so what follows is at the level of a search summary and is flagged as such.³ At that level, four things are established and they are worth having.

It is the opening line of an essay in The Economist, published on 19 November 1955. Not a paper, not a study, not a report of anything anybody measured.

Its author presents it as a commonplace observation, which is to say he isn't claiming to have discovered it. That is a considerable distance from how it's used seventy years later.

The essay is a satire, and it is about something else. Its actual subject is why bureaucracies grow regardless of how much work there is to do, and its two stated drivers are that an official wants to multiply subordinates rather than rivals, and that officials make work for each other.

And no empirical test of the time-expansion claim was found. A 2008 study by Klimek, Hanel and Thurner tests Parkinson's committee argument, which is a different claim of his and not this sentence.

So the most repeated sentence in this subject is the opening line of a satirical essay about why bureaucracies grow, offered by its author as an everyday observation rather than as a result, with no empirical test of it found when this course went looking, and quoted for seventy years as though it were one.

Habit three: the honest answer to "does this work"

You have reached the end of a course on time management. It would be a strange place not to ask.

Lesson 1 gave you the headline, and this is the disagreement underneath it. What you already have from there is that the measured relationship with wellbeing is larger than the one with performance. What you haven't got yet is that the field's two reviews of itself don't agree about performance at all, and that neither of them can tell you anything caused anything at all.

Two reviews of the whole field, fourteen years apart, and they do not agree.

Claessens and colleagues, 2007, reviewing the literature to that point: time management behaviours "relate positively to perceived control of time, job satisfaction, and health, and negatively to stress. The relationship with work and academic performance is not clear."¹ The same review found no empirical study in the subject published before 1982, having searched from 1954.¹ And it names its own limits, which is worth giving it since the newer paper gets its limits given below: it reports that time management has been defined and operationalised in a variety of ways, that some instruments were not reliable or valid, which could account for unstable findings, and that the majority of its respondents were students in psychology classes.¹

Aeon, Faber and Panaccio, 2021, pooling 158 studies, 53,957 participants and 490 effect sizes: time management "is moderately related to job performance, academic achievement, and wellbeing", and shows "a moderate, negative relationship with distress".² Job performance came out at r = .25 and distress at r = -0.358. r is a correlation, which runs from nought for no relationship to one for a perfect one, and a minus sign means the two move in opposite directions, so more time management goes with less distress. The authors and the authors note that the link to job performance appears to increase over the years.

The newer review is larger and pooled over far more studies. Both are correlational. Neither can tell you time management caused anything, and the 2021 authors add that most of the studies they pooled are cross-sectional, measuring people at one moment rather than following them through a change. They add a limitation that is unusually frank: studies "often don't explain what, exactly, is taught in time management training seminars",² so the pooled effect is the effect of something not well specified.

So the honest answer is that something is there, that it is probably not what the genre sells, and that nobody has shown it is causal.

That middle clause is the one to carry away. Both reviews point at the same region: control, satisfaction, health, stress. The 2021 paper puts it directly, finding that time management enhances wellbeing, and life satisfaction in particular, to a greater extent than it does performance, with the effect on life satisfaction about 72 percent stronger than the effect on job satisfaction.²

Lesson 1 told you that, and refused on those grounds to promise you more output. You now have the evidence it was standing on, and you can check whether the course kept its word.

The books you will be given

You will meet this subject mostly through trade books, and a course that never named them would be pretending you were not going to.

Allen, Covey, Drucker, Lakein, Burkeman, Newport. Between them they are very widely read.

This course hasn't opened any of them, which is recorded on the unread line of its research file. The build enforces that line everywhere except the naming in this section, which needed an exemption written for it and hasn't got one anywhere else.⁵ No claim in this course rests on having read any of them, and the one judgement below rests on a search summary and says that too. So this section is not an assessment of those books, because the course hasn't earned one. It is about what to do when somebody hands you one.

Apply the three habits. Sort each claim. Trace each figure. And ask the question this course asked about itself in lesson 1, which is what the author claims the thing is for.

One of them is worth naming separately, on the same search-summary basis and flagged as such. Burkeman argues against the genre's own premise rather than within it, which makes him the one this course would open first if a future session opens any.⁴ That is a note about where to spend a reading, not an endorsement of a book nobody here has read.

Three things people believe about this literature

"Somebody must have checked." Lesson 5's trace is the answer, and the general form is worse than the specific one. The subject's best-known figure has no printed source anybody can produce, and it's repeated daily in rooms full of professionals. Assume nothing has been checked until you have checked it, which is a cheap assumption, because checking takes twenty minutes.

"An old study is out of date." Sometimes, and the distinction matters. Figures that describe a time and place go stale: on United States time-diary data the estimate-against-diary gap was 6.2 hours a week in 1985 and 2.4 across 2003 to 2007, so quoting either without its year is a defect. Findings about how people reason do not obviously go stale the same way. That people forecast by imagining the run that goes well is a claim about how forecasting works, and the study being from 1994 is not in itself an argument against it. Ask which kind of claim you are looking at. That distinction is Using AI Effectively lesson 11's and it holds here for the same reason.

"The science says..." There is less science than the phrase implies. The 2007 review searched from 1954 and found no empirical study before 1982, and concluded that time management "has made its way into the literature without being accompanied by empirical research".¹ The literature arrived after the practice, which is the reverse of the usual order of things and explains a good deal about the state of it.

Practice

Connections

Back. This lesson uses the whole course. Lesson 1's measurement is what the second exercise closes, and lesson 2's sort is what the reader opens beside it; lesson 7 gave the short form of the Parkinson provenance and this lesson gives the whole of it; lesson 3's finding about forecasting is what makes Parkinson's claim plausible without making it evidenced; lesson 5's trace is the worked example this lesson reasons about rather than repeats; and lesson 6's admission that it is mostly unmeasurable advice is the test case for whether the sort is fair. From earlier Core courses: the three-way sort is Digital Literacy lesson 8's and Using AI Effectively lesson 11's, adapted; Logic and Argument lesson 9 gives the four rules for checking a source that the tracing exercise runs on; and How to Learn Anything lesson 3 is why the last exercise asks you to write from memory first.

Out. The project asks for a fortnight of all of this at once. After that, the habits here are the part of this course that keeps working when the figures in it have gone stale, which they will: the gap this course opened with has been a different size in every decade anybody measured it.

Go deeper

• A review of the time management literature (Personnel Review, 2007). This course has read the abstract and pages 255 to 257. The abstract alone will tell you more about what is established here than most summaries of the subject will.
• A meta-analysis of 158 time-management samples (PLOS ONE, 2021), open access, and read here at the abstract, the effect sizes and the limitations. Read the limitations beside the abstract, which is a good general habit and is this lesson's specific point.
• Interruptions cost 23 minutes 15 seconds, right? (2023). A blog post, not a source, and linked because it is the tracing exercise done properly and written up. Read it as a method.

Sources

1. Brigitte J. C. Claessens, Wendelien van Eerde, Christel G. Rutte and Robert A. Roe, "A review of the time management literature", Personnel Review 36(2), 2007, pages 255 to 276. Read in part: the abstract and pages 255 to 257. Supports: the quoted verdict on control, satisfaction, health, stress and performance; that no empirical study was found before 1982 in a search from 1954; and the quoted sentence about the subject reaching the literature without empirical research.
2. Brad Aeon, Aïda Faber and Alexandra Panaccio, "Does time management work? A meta-analysis", PLOS ONE 16(1), e0245066, 2021. Abstract read verbatim; effect sizes and limitations read. Supports: 158 studies, 53,957 participants and 490 effect sizes; the quoted abstract; r = .25 for job performance and r = -0.358 for distress; that the link to job performance appears to increase over the years; the wellbeing finding and the 72 percent figure; and the quoted limitation about unspecified training content.
3. C. Northcote Parkinson, "Parkinson's Law", The Economist, 19 November 1955. Not read in the original; search-summary level only, which the body states where the section begins. At that level: the sentence opens the essay, its author offers it as a commonplace observation rather than as a result, the essay is a satire about the growth of bureaucracies with two stated drivers, and no empirical test of the time-expansion claim was found. A 2008 study by Klimek, Hanel and Thurner tests Parkinson's committee argument and not this claim. The famous sentence is quoted, because every retelling quotes it and this course has it verbatim at search-summary level; nothing beyond it is.
4. Four things in this lesson are the course's own and say so where the reader meets them. The four sorted pieces of advice are constructed for the exercise rather than quoted from anybody. The three reasons this genre produces unsourced numbers are the course's reasoning, not a finding. The judgement that Burkeman would be the one to open first rests on the same search-summary level as everything else this course knows about the trade canon. And the reading of Parkinson's claim as plausible given lesson 3's finding is an argument for it rather than evidence of it, which the callout says.
5. Four figures in this lesson belong to earlier lessons and are cited there rather than repeated here, which is lesson 7's convention. The resumption finding about more than two intervening activities and the trace across five papers and twenty-three blog posts are lesson 5's, from Mark, Gonzalez and Harris at CHI 2005 and from the oberien blog post of 2023. The estimate-against-diary gap by decade is lesson 1's, from Robinson and colleagues 2011. The 1994 forecasting study is lesson 3's, from Buehler, Griffin and Ross.
6. The six trade authors named above are on this course's unread line with a lesson 8 exemption, added when this lesson was drafted. The exemption lets the lesson name them; it does not let it cite them, and no claim anywhere in this course rests on any of them.