A Proactive Approach to Time Scarcity

Use Present Time to Create Future Time

I recently wrote a post about mental bandwidth, and its impact on our choices. In this post, I will describe time scarcity: a common cause of reduced mental bandwidth for managers. It’s the all-too-familiar problem of having too much work and not enough time.

Scarcity

If you’re operating under time constraints, you’re experiencing time scarcity. If you’re operating without enough food, you’re experiencing food scarcity.

Scarcity, by Sendhil Mullainathan, cites a study where subjects were given a task to push a button when they saw a red dot on a screen. Sometimes, another picture would flash on the screen right before the dot.

For dieters, if the pre-dot picture was of food, they would miss the red dot completely. For non-dieters, the pre-dot picture did not affect whether they saw the red dot.

If you’re short on food, thoughts of food capture your focus. If you’re short on time, you’re likely to focus on how you’re short on time. In Mullainathan’s terms, scarcity “imposes itself on our minds.”

As illustrated in the red dot study, focus on scarcity occurs involuntarily. This phenomenon is called tunneling. Think “tunnel vision,” where you can only see objects in the tunnel while peripheral imagery blurs out.

When scarcity pulls you into a cognitive tunnel, you miss things — possibly important things.

Focus on scarcity occurs involuntarily.

I once forgot to review a presentation after I augmented it with data from another slide deck. I was running late for work, so I copied, pasted, and rushed out the door.

In retrospect, reviewing the presentation was more important than being on time to work that day; apologizing to two people for being late to a meeting is less damaging than causing a presentation mishap. Unfortunately, I was tunneling on getting to work on time, and for those few moments, it was all that mattered. I missed the red dot.

During the presentation, I came across an unfamiliar slide that I’d mistakenly copied over that morning and I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to recover gracefully. The result? “Oh…uh…I don’t know what this is. Let’s move on.”

Ouch.

Managers deal with time scarcity all the time. How do we prevent scarcity-induced tunnel vision? Are we doomed to make poor decisions?

Slack

(No, not the app!)

Slack is the solution to scarcity. Build slack into your life during times of abundance to keep scarcity from claiming your choices. Just like setting money aside in a savings account is a sensible practice while you’re earning, creating time-saving strategies is a sensible practice while you have time to spare.

Remembering to create slack can be challenging. We usually don’t think about the worst of times when we’re living in the best of times, so you may have to consciously work on creating this habit.

Here are a few ways you can create slack to mitigate time scarcity:

Personal redundancy.

By enabling others to do parts of your job, you earn yourself slack and prevent yourself from being the single point of failure.

You can create personal redundancy by closing documentation gaps, leveraging project management tools to automate processes, and mentoring your team members. Use tools to handle the simple, repetitive parts of your job, and train your team members to do the more complex parts of your job.

25 minutes of progress.

Procrastination will inevitably lead to time scarcity. If you put something off till the last minute, then by definition, you have only the last minute to do it.

To convince yourself to start working on a project with a seemingly distant deadline, you can reorient the goal to be about the process of working instead of the outcome.

For example, instead of thinking “I will work on this project till it’s done,” you think, “I will work on this project for 25 minutes.” This reduces your anxiety around accomplishing a seemingly gargantuan goal and refocuses your energy on making progress.

Create protected time blocks.

Set aside “think time,” every week. Hold these time blocks sacred, and ask others to honor them. These time blocks will be especially handy during busy weeks where you need time to pause.

Use the zero-based budgeting approach with meetings.

Think about which meetings you would add to your calendar if it were completely empty. Which meetings do you currently attend that are not on your list of chosen meetings? Strongly consider removing them. Be protective of your time.

Use present time to create future time.

Use any slack time you have to brainstorm ways to create more slack time. Implement ideas on this list, or come up with new ways to create time.

Encourage your team members to do the same by asking them to highlight inefficiencies on your team.

Once this practice becomes a part of your weekly ritual, you may find yourself with more time than you know what to do with. You can leverage this newfound time for creative and strategic thinking.

The Focus Dividend

There’s a reason deadlines work. Scarcity focuses the mind and can protect you against distractions while you’re racing to meet a project deadline. This positive outcome of scarcity is known as the focus dividend.

While it may be tempting to leverage the focus dividend to extract more efficiency, it comes at the cost of tunneling. Though slack may cause you to be more wasteful with your time, it rewards you with awareness and the ability to be more deliberate with your choices.

Conclusion

Awareness of scarcity’s impact on your mental bandwidth and decision-making helps in mitigating its repercussions. It prompts you to pause and look past the veil of time scarcity and consider your true priorities.

Though awareness and low-bandwidth mitigation strategies can protect your decisions during periods of time-scarcity, slack is the only solution that will truly neutralize it. Use present time to create future time.

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Resources

Scarcity — This book provides fascinating studies that prove the effects of time scarcity on our bandwidth and as a result, our choices.

Understanding Bandwidth — A recent blog post of mine that talks about mental bandwidth, how it affects our decisions, and how you can protect it.

Thanks to Josh Mitchell, Patrick Rivera, and Compound Writing for the reviews!