If you are watching a FIFA World Cup match and you see the players of the leading side frittering away the minutes by passing amongst themselves, you would be justified in jumping up and shouting: “That’s not cricket.” It’s not football also, of course; the authorities have often tweaked the laws to eliminate such time wasting.

What is apparent on sporting fields is not so obvious when it comes to the corporate world. A study by Bain & Co titled “Managing Your Scarcest Resource” says: “Most companies have elaborate procedures for managing capital; by contrast, an organisation’s time goes largely unmanaged… Without effective time management practices in place, we are seeing a marked increase in dysfunctional time management behaviours (double booking, over-attendance, non-engaged attendance, etc).”

The two biggest villains are communications and meetings. “In the 1970s, communications were limited; on average, executives had less than 1,000 communications per year from people other than co-workers. Today, executives receive more than 30,000 external communications per year. The more senior an executive, the more time subordinates must spend filtering, organising, and coping with all those messages and conversations.”

The sheer mass means that the value of these communications is vastly reduced. Consider email, the biggest contributor to this communication growth. Spam nearly destroyed its efficiency. Then email service providers discovered ways to filter out spam. The merchants of spam found ways of beating that. You are in a situation today, where important messages get lost while spam marked ‘important’ or ‘priority’ bobs up in your mailbox like a ubiquitous Narendra Modi mask. Beware too of addresses that say they will stop sending you mails if you indicate that you don’t want them. This is just their way of finding out that your email ID is active. Besides, this is the age of social media, Twitter, Facebook and accessible CEOs. The top brass that does not interact with clients and customers will lose out in the marketplace.

The second villain in Bain’s books is the meeting. “Senior executives today devote more than two days every week to meetings involving three or more co-workers,” says the report. Forget the fact that WhatsApp and Twitter is ticking away during meetings, “at a representative company Bain analysed, in 22 per cent of meetings, participants sent three or more e-mails, on average, for every 30 minutes of meeting time.”

Bain has its suggestions (see box). But its principal prescription is that you must treat time like money. That’s a traditional cliché. But there is an opposing school of thought too. Commenting on a study by Francesca Gino of Harvard and Cassie Mogilner of the University of Pennsylvania, The Economist writes: “Thinking about time has the opposite effect on people from thinking about money. It makes them more honest than normal, rather than less so. Moreover, the more reflective they are, the more honest they become.” (The test is too elaborate to be detailed here, but you can find out more at http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/12/06/0956797613506438.abstract.)

“In a work-by-the-hour society it is easy to see how the saying time equals money came about,” says life coach Jonathan Wells. “At a set hourly wage, the more hours you work the more money you will make. We can also relate to the fact that a certain amount of money is required to meet our material needs. Somehow though, the perceived value of money has eclipsed the real value of time. Let’s splash a little reality on that idea right now. Time is the most valuable commodity there is. Its value cannot be measured in dollars and cents because time is the fundamental unit of life. Money is just a unit of trade that we have assigned a certain value to.”

The two arguments, however, belong to opposite sides of the spectrum. The diehard corporate type has no meeting ground with the person who feels that spiritual issues matter more. They only agree on one thing – time is valuable. The difference comes in whether it is best spent on messaging, meeting or meditating.

THE EIGHT DEADLY SINS

Bain’s time management sins and their cures:

• Muddled companywide agendas: Make them clear and selective so all know how to use extra time and what tasks can be shelved with penalty.

• “Time is free” approach to scheduling: Create zero-based time budget and manage organisational time as rigorously as capital assets.

• “Let’s start a project” mindset: Require a business case for any new project.

• Thickening middle: Simplify the organisation. More managers and layers rob time and create more work for others.

• ACS – “Anyone Can Schedule”: Create a line of authority for who can call and set meetings.

• Decision-making or decision-murky? Manage decision-making – not the matrix for it – by standardising the process.

• Meeting Time is Free Time: Establish discipline by requiring clear agendas, advance preparation, on-time starts. When possible, finish early.

• “Where’d the time go?” Track meeting time, attendance and email volume to assess productivity. What is not monitored cannot be measured.

Source: Bain