Time Management? More Like Life Management!

Last Tuesday, I watched a middle manager at a Melbourne CBD office building have what can only be described as a complete meltdown. Not because of a major crisis or company restructure, but because his calendar had three meetings at the same time and he couldn't figure out which one to attend first.

This bloke – let's call him Dave – was literally standing in the hallway, phone in one hand, laptop bag in the other, looking like a kangaroo caught in headlights. The irony? He'd just come out of a "productivity masterclass" seminar. Classic.

Here's my controversial take: most time management training is absolute rubbish.

There, I said it. After fifteen years of watching executives, team leaders, and front-line workers struggle with the same basic issues, I'm convinced we're teaching people the wrong bloody thing entirely. We're not dealing with time management – we're dealing with life management, priority management, and let's be honest, basic decision-making skills that somehow got lost in the shuffle of adult life.

The problem isn't that people don't know how to use calendars or write to-do lists. The problem is that most of us are trying to fit forty-seven hours of work into a twenty-four-hour day and pretending that's a sustainable strategy. It's like trying to fit a Toyota HiLux through a bicycle lane – technically possible if you remove most of the essential parts, but you're going to end up with a mess.

Let me tell you what really works.

First controversial opinion: throw out your colour-coded calendar system. Yes, I know some productivity guru told you that red means urgent and blue means important, but you're not air traffic control at Sydney Airport. You're a human being with a brain that can actually think about priorities without needing a rainbow to guide you.

I learned this the hard way when I spent an entire weekend creating the "perfect" calendar system for a client – different colours for different types of tasks, elaborate coding systems, automated reminders every fifteen minutes. Know what happened? They ignored it completely within a week because maintaining the system took longer than actually doing the work.

The real secret to time management isn't about managing time at all. Time's going to tick by whether you're productive or not. What you're actually managing is energy, attention, and let's face it, your own bloody stubborn habits.

Think about it this way: you've got maybe four hours of proper, focused work in you each day. Maybe six if you're some kind of superhuman caffeine machine, but let's be realistic. The rest of your day is maintenance mode – emails, meetings that could've been emails, more emails about the meetings that should've been emails, and pretending to look busy while actually thinking about what you're having for dinner.

So why do we keep pretending we can optimise our way to sixteen-hour productive days? It's madness.

Here's what actually works, based on working with everyone from tradies to CEOs: pick three things. Not thirty. Three. Do those three things when your brain is actually functioning – usually in the morning before the day starts eating itself alive with interruptions and "quick questions" that turn into hour-long conversations about your colleague's weekend plans.

Everything else? Everything else can wait.

I know this sounds simplistic, but I've seen this approach transform entire teams. One manufacturing company in Adelaide was drowning in daily task lists that looked like novels. Workers were stressed, management was frustrated, and productivity was shocking despite everyone working longer hours than a 24-hour McDonald's.

We stripped it back to three priority tasks per person per day. That's it. No elaborate systems, no special software, no productivity apps that cost more than a decent bottle of wine. Just three things that actually mattered.

Production improved by 34% within two months. Staff stress levels dropped so dramatically that their sick leave usage halved. And the best part? People started leaving work on time because they weren't constantly chasing their tails with endless task lists.

But here's where it gets interesting – and this is my second controversial opinion – most time management problems aren't actually time management problems. They're communication training problems disguised as scheduling issues.

Think about it. How many of your "time management" disasters actually start with someone not communicating clearly about expectations, deadlines, or priorities? How many meetings run long because nobody knows how to cut off the person who's been talking about their cat for fifteen minutes? How many projects blow out because someone was too polite to say "that's not actually possible in that timeframe"?

The ability to say "no" is a time management skill. The ability to ask clarifying questions is a time management skill. The ability to tell your boss that their "quick favour" is actually a three-day project is definitely a time management skill.

We spend so much time teaching people about productivity apps and scheduling techniques that we forget to teach them how to have the conversations that prevent the time management problems in the first place.

I once worked with a team leader who was working sixty-hour weeks and constantly stressed about falling behind. Turned out, she was saying yes to every request that came her way because she didn't want to seem difficult or uncooperative. Classic people-pleaser syndrome.

Within a month of learning how to ask "when do you need this by?" and "what can I deprioritise to make room for this?", her workload became manageable. Not because she learned better time management techniques, but because she learned better communication training strategies.

Here's another thing nobody talks about: energy management trumps time management every single time.

You can have the most perfectly organised schedule in the world, but if you're trying to tackle your most complex work at 3 PM when your brain has turned to mush from back-to-back meetings, you're not going to get anything meaningful done. It's like trying to run a marathon after spending all day moving furniture – technically possible, but you're setting yourself up for a pretty miserable experience.

I learned this from a tradie in Darwin who had the best system I've ever seen. He did all his planning and quoting work first thing in the morning when his mind was sharp. Physical work happened during the middle of the day when he had energy but didn't need to think as hard. Admin and follow-ups happened in the afternoon when he was tired but could still handle routine tasks.

Brilliant. Simple. Effective.

Compare that to the office workers I see trying to write strategic reports at 4 PM on a Friday after a week of twelve-hour days. It's like watching someone try to perform surgery with oven mitts on.

The other thing that drives me absolutely mental about traditional time management advice is the obsession with efficiency over effectiveness. Being efficient at the wrong things is just a really organised way to achieve nothing important.

I can teach you to process emails 23% faster, but if those emails are mostly about meetings that shouldn't exist discussing projects that don't actually matter, what's the point? You're just becoming a more efficient hamster on a wheel that's not going anywhere.

Real time management – or life management, whatever you want to call it – starts with figuring out what actually matters. Not what feels urgent, not what other people think matters, but what genuinely moves the needle for your work, your team, your company, or your life.

This is where most people get stuck because it requires making decisions and choices, and humans are notoriously bad at both. It's easier to stay busy with comfortable, familiar tasks than to focus on the uncomfortable, challenging work that actually makes a difference.

But here's the thing – and I learned this from watching my own mistakes over the years – being busy is not the same as being productive. Looking busy is not the same as adding value. Having a full calendar is not the same as having a meaningful day.

Some of the most productive people I know work fewer hours than their less productive colleagues. They're just brutally honest about what deserves their attention and what doesn't.

They've mastered the art of strategic laziness – being completely slack about things that don't matter so they can be completely focused on things that do. It's like being a productivity ninja, but instead of throwing stars, you're throwing away distractions.

The technology angle is worth discussing too, because every second person I meet has downloaded seventeen different productivity apps and still can't find time to return a phone call from last week.

Apps don't solve human problems. They just give human problems a digital interface.

If you're disorganised with pen and paper, you'll be disorganised with the latest AI-powered, cloud-synced, blockchain-enabled productivity platform. The only difference is you'll be disorganised while paying a monthly subscription fee.

The best time management training I've ever delivered didn't involve any technology more complex than a notepad and a watch. We focused on decision-making frameworks, priority-setting conversations, and the lost art of saying "that's not going to work for me."

Revolutionary stuff, apparently.

Look, I'm not saying all productivity tools are useless. Some are genuinely helpful for specific situations. But they're tools, not solutions. A hammer doesn't build a house – a skilled carpenter with a plan builds a house. The hammer just helps with the implementation.

Same with time management. The systems and tools can help with implementation, but they can't help with the fundamental questions: What are you trying to achieve? What's actually important? What are you willing to sacrifice to get there?

Those are the conversations we should be having instead of obsessing over the perfect scheduling app.

So what does good time management – sorry, life management – actually look like in practice?

It looks like having uncomfortable conversations about workload and expectations before you're drowning in deadlines. It looks like protecting your peak energy hours like they're made of gold-plated unicorn tears. It looks like being selfish with your attention because nobody else is going to do it for you.

It looks like admitting that you can't do everything, shouldn't do everything, and definitely shouldn't try to do everything at the same time while also trying to maintain some semblance of a life outside work.

Most importantly, it looks like treating time as a finite resource that deserves respect, not an infinite commodity that you can stretch and squeeze to accommodate every request that comes your way.

Because here's the truth that most productivity gurus won't tell you: good time management isn't about doing more things faster. It's about doing fewer things better, with less stress and more satisfaction.

And sometimes, just sometimes, it's about having the courage to do nothing at all.