Do time management apps really make people more productive?

[SimonLab]

from https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/18/time-management-apps-work-life-balance-productivity

“When we make that data transparent to others, that’s where we get into a situation where we start manipulating our activities to create good data,”

"The guiding principal behind time management is to restore a person’s sense of control to her day."

[Cleop]

Challenge: how do we back up our app with science/data to encourage people that it's worthwhile? How do you measure efficiency?

Although app developers claim their software can increase productivity, few have the hard data to demonstrate increased efficiency.

“There’s really not that much good research around on these apps, especially because they’re so different from each other,” said Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and co-founder of Timeful, a time management system that was acquired by Google in May.

Most time management apps are based on what Gregg describes as “the advice and pseudoscience of the time management of the 70s.” That is, a compelling type of self-help philosophy that claims to be grounded in science without the research or evidence to back it up.

Prioritising tasks features are good:

“If you think about what your real priorities are versus what you end up doing in the day, those are not often the same thing. So any software that uses the priority approach is a very good thing,”

[nelsonic]

@SimonLab thanks for sharing this article and opening this discussion. 👍

If anyone uses the word "productivity" to describe what we are building @dwyl I will refer them to this issue/comment/thread and hopefully they will understand that "productivity" is not what we are trying to help anyone achieve.

The quick answer to Leah's question is No!

The longer answer is that this question totally misses the point of "deep" creative work!
The curse of "productivity" is that people always "manipulate" data to make it/themselves look good,
(this tends to happen in organisations where the employees don't understand or share the mission and are only there to collect a paycheque and so need to show "activity"... sadly is most organisations!)

Red Herring ⚠️

In the Guardian article shared above, the author Leah Messinger asks the clickbaity question:

This question is a "Red herring" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring a "logical fallacy that leads readers or audiences towards a false conclusion". Contrary to the popular and often-repeated misconception, "productivity" has never been the aim of a creative technologist. No truly successful creative (tech) person is is focussing on their "productivity". They might be prolific or prodigious in their output, but they are not focussing on the quantity they are producing, rather they care about the quality and effectiveness. Unless the person in question is an "artist" who is paid by the "piece" in which case they absolutely will optimise for output quantity (and thus get paid more) ... but we are not artists, we are designers there's a big difference! Art is all about "expression" and "communicating feelings about society" ... design is how things work.

“Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.” ~ Steve Jobs

As designers, we get paid for deliberate thinking about how to put less in the interface!
A UX designer is not compensated in proportion to the quantity of screens, buttons or clicks the user of an App is required to go through before they achieve the "objective" of their user-journey.
On the contrary, the best UX/UI or API designers are those who can remove complexity and "steps"!

Like it or not, every job/task in technology is "UX"! If you are writing a function that anyone else will invoke (e.g: in a re-useable module) you are creating a User Experience for your fellow developer.

Everything you do (unless you live alone and don't interact with anyone else and only create things for your own use and keep everything private) is used by someone else.

Productivity can often be the opposite of effectiveness. If someone is measured on "productivity" they are measured for the quantity of their output i.e. "more, more more!"

"Productivity" is a perverse measure for creative technologists, rewarding doing more creates clutter! Instead minimalism should be encouraged and pursued. i.e. "the disciplined pursuit of less"

Compare the above "Microsoft Word" interface (yes, this is an older UI exaggerated-for-effect there are duplicate/redundant icons, but that often happens in UIs where multiple buttons have the same outcome!) with something like OmmWriter: https://ommwriter.com/

This app might not be familiar to you, as it's "Mac Only", but the point is that the designer & developer of this hugely popular independent writing app; has distilled the essence of what the user is trying to achieve, removes all the clutter and gives a much better UX. I guarantee you that the people developing OmmWriter (or any other minimalist UX app) are not aiming to be "productive", rather their mission is to find the minimum UI to achieve an objective; in this case writing text.

Our aim as creative technologists is to solve a particular problem/challenge by creating the simplest and most intuitive interface/experience that minimises the number of steps required to achieve the user's objective. Our aim as "coders" is to write the least code (or even zero code if we are able to re-use an existing module/package!) in the most maintainable and reliable way. This has absolutely nothing to do with "productivity" and instead is a question of effectiveness.

Journalists who are paid by the number of words in their articles (i.e. their "output") have an incentive to write more words even if they could say the same thing in fewer! Provided their "social science" claims are appealing to their reader's confirmation bias and/or are not immediately refutable by other more reliable scientific/empirical evidence they get published.

The journalist that authored this post while perfectly nice and good at writing, is not an "authority" on the subject of "time management", creative excellence or personal effectiveness. They write on a variety of topics (whatever tickles their fancy; see: http://leahmessinger.com/reporting ...) and don't have any deep work expertise/knowledge beyond their own subjective/anecdotal superficial observation ...
I know this sounds "harsh" ... but it's not like they have done exhaustive research (e.g: extensive academic literature review or primary research of their own) on the subject. So we should not consider this article with the same relevance as one by Cal Newport, Brian Tracy or Thomas Frank who are considerably more effective with their time.

To be clear I think the article is well-written (for an opinion piece) but it entirely misses the point!

Our Objective with building Time is to help people keep track of how they are spending their time and help people determine if they are being effective at working on their most valuable tasks.
Only by tracking the majority of one's day can the person truly see how they are spending their time (e.g: 2h per day on "commuting", 1h on instagram, 1h making food, 2h watching TV/Netflix, etc...)

It frustrates me immensely that I have been unable to communicate this with people despite numerous attempts. Our Time app is first and foremost about helping people to stop wasting their own time. Nobody I currently know can honestly say they are making the most of their lives without wasting time on fruitless activities. Obviously, we should not compare ourselves to Elon Musk or Tony Robbins who maximise their time and see the corresponding results in their businesses and lives. But we should compare ourselves to ourselves yesterday, last month, year, etc. And that can only be done with data.

Apps?

The Guardian article mentions that Melissa Gregg (principal engineer at Intel who is researching the future of work) "reviewed 50 time management apps" ... None of these apps have taken true advantage of technology to make a UI/UX that is effortless and obviously worth using.

Some of the apps mentioned:

• Streak - https://www.streak.com
  

• Esper - https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/10/esper if you go to https://esper.com you'll see that they are now a "A modern framework for public policy" ... not really a "time management" app. #pivot
  

• Timely - https://timelyapp.com
  

• ATracker - https://atracker.pro/home.html
  

• Toggl ... one of the most popular according to Thomas Frank but as we've seen the both the On-boarding an UX of the product leave much to be desired! Toggl product-ux-research#34

• Timeful was an iOS todo list and calendar app created by Dan Ariely acquired by Google and then deleted it from the App Store and took down the website. See: https://github.com/dwyl/time/issues/203

All of these Apps present people with a "Landing" or "Spash" page to sell them on the idea of their App. We are going to do something different, no "sell" just start a timer for the person and then guide them through the "on-boarding" immediately.

In the middle of the article, the author writes:

"Done right, Gregg said: “It actually does take the place of a spiritual or religious dimension for some people.”

This is not something we agree with or want to pursue at all! We see the @dwyl app as a tool for helping people achieve their goals/objectives; definitely not as a "spiritual or religious dimension".

While we do want to build a product that has incredible UX worthy of people being excited about sharing with their friends, family and work colleagues/team, we definitely don't think it's a "spiritual".

I'm not "spiritual" about my Laptop. It helps me get my job done and helps me achieve my personal goals, but it's just a (very good/useful) "tool", not a "religion".

"a company has to choose between apps that live on an employee’s hard drive and those that store information in the cloud"

No! For a team using a tool to share what they are working on and request help when they are stuck, all data needs to be synched in real-time to a web-based interface. Storing data on the user's "hard drive" is useless for teamwork!

"An effective business app also needs to separate personal from professional tasks and let an employee choose to report only work-related data to avoid potential violations of privacy or other legal grey areas."

Agreed. (fairly obvs, but this separation needs to be clear and permissions must work) 👍

"A product that works well for some employees and managers may also be less effective for others, depending on the variety of work styles and culture"

Yes, this is stating the obvious, but this statement does not explain why some people find the tool to be less effective ... that is the question Leah should have attempted to answer, but doesn't!
The reality is that many people don't want to be "accountable" for the time the spend on a task because they fear that the "transparency" this brings will mean they actually have to get some work done. Many people are chronically ineffective with their time and don't want to get better because they are "comfortable" with mediocrity! 😞
Sadly, the people who are not pushing themselves to work smarter, learn faster and create something amazing, are going to be wiped out by AI before they reach "retirement". The reality that ineffective people will be replaced by automation (or other people who want to be time-effective) is something many people are choosing to ignore!

ignoring reality is a terrible life "strategy"

The reality is that most people don't want to be excellent at what they do for a living or in life.
They don't want to track how they are spending their time because they don't want to think about how much of it they are wasting!

"It’s way better to start with the individual view. Nail that experience, and then go at the whole company.”

Again, we agree and have been saying this since the start, focus on the individual "user", then add "team" features and eventually a 360^o view.

mid-way through the article comes the following quote from the author:

"Although app developers claim their software can increase productivity, few have the hard data to demonstrate increased efficiency."

It's really important to be clear on vocabulary here.

• productivity - the measure of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input. a more "productive" person produces more "units".
• efficiency - the state or quality of being efficient. the ratio of the useful work performed by a machine or in a process to the total energy expended or heat taken in. how efficiently an input (e.g. the person's time) is "converted" into an output (e.g: "widgets").
• effectiveness - the degree to which something is successful in producing a desired result; success.

People often use these words interchangeably, but they are not the same.
It's like saying that blue 🔵 is "the same" as red 🔴 ... yes they are both colors,
but the reality is that they are opposite ends of the color spectrum!

productivity is making more units of something in a given amount of time.
efficiency is how well you make the units of that thing (it's the "conversion" rate)
effectiveness is the degree to which you made the right thing (i.e what people want!)

You could be super "productive" at making tuna icecream, your factory might be mega "efficient" but you are not being effective at making a product that anyone wants to buy!

This is why Stephen Covey's seminal book on "Highly Effective People" is not about "productivity".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People
And indeed the following quote from the book perfectly summarises this:

The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, 'Wrong jungle!' ... Busy, efficient producers and managers often respond ... 'Shut up! We’re making progress!'

This is the curse of "productivity" when people should be striving for effectiveness!!

"Most time management apps are based on what Gregg describes as “the advice and pseudoscience of the time management of the 70s.” That is, a compelling type of self-help philosophy that claims to be grounded in science without the research or evidence to back it up."

Yes, there is not a lot of science or empirical evidence for the existing "time management" apps, which is why the vast majority of humanity does not use them! Even the top "time management" app (Toggl) has only had 3 Million people sign up see: dwyl/product-ux-research#34 this is not the number of regular users, just registrations. That's less than 0.1% of of people with access to the internet.
I would not be surprised if Toggl has fewer than 10% of their registered users as regular users.
Even so, if you have an App with 100k people paying $9/user/month ($9M/month or $108M/Year revenue), you can build a reasonably sustainable software product. 💭

What do highly ambitious/motivated/effective people do differently from "average" achievers...?

Ingvar

In a rare interview, Ingvar Kamprad (RIP), founder of IKEA, attributed much of his "success" as an entrepreneur to his time management system:

"You can do so much in 10 minutes’ time. Divide your life into 10-minute units
and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity".

Yes, this is not "scientific" ... but if someone who went from selling Pencils to building the biggest furniture empire in History in his lifetime attributes much of his business success to his focus on dividing up his schedule and not wasting time, perhaps it's worth listing to him? 👂

Elon

Elon Musk, arguably one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history, similarly breaks his day into 5 minute slots and protects his time fiercely from interruptions and distractions. Elon's "timeboxing" and tracking is _legendary! That's why he can be the CEO of two billion dollar companies, and still have time to spend with his five sons and do cameos in StarTrek, Big Bang Theory and The Simpsons!

This is not someone who is leaving their task/time-management to chance!

https://youtu.be/fbAYK4KQrso

Elon's current commitments include:

• Founder, CEO, Lead Designer of SpaceX
• CEO, Product Architect of Tesla, Inc.
• Co-founder, CEO of Neuralink (company for human-machine interface)
• Founder of The Boring Company (high speed transport tunnels)
  see: ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_building_and_boring
• Co-founder of OpenAI (an effort to avoid the AI apocalypse most people are oblivious to!)

What could you achieve if you decided to be effective with your time...?

"One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.” ~ Tony Robbins

What If You Don't Schedule, Estimate & Track Time?

Perhaps a better question people should ask is what happens when you don't schedule, estimate and track your time? What happens...? When nothing is measured considerably less gets done because of combination of:

1. "Parkinson's law": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law whereby "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". i.e. estimation is essential to avoiding letting work "drag on" indefinitely. If people want to do the same task forever, they should work in the public sector, e.g: on "Brexit planning" 🙄
2. "Pygmalion effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect the phenomenon whereby
   "others' expectations of a target person affect the target person's performance." If people around you have low expectations of what you can deliver, you will generally deliver very little.
3. "What get's measured get's done"; if nothing is measured, very little (if anything) gets done!

In an organisation where "activity" is rewarded instead of outcome, nothing is done.
But when everyone in the team is aligned on the shared objective, incredible feats are achieved!

Time Tracking Works Everywhere

The beauty of tracking time on activities is that it "works everywhere". Time is a "universal constant" in people's lives. The same hour someone spends watching Neflix or on "Social Media" they could spend reading a book on investment and/or researching which company to buy shares in. In the first use of time they are burning the time and moving themselves away from a goal (happiness) whereas in the second use of time they might invest in a stock that grows by 10x in 2 years and be able to retire early!

I start a timer when I go to the supermarket or when I prepare a meal because I like to know exactly how much time it's taking/taken me. My conclusion is that I need to hire a "housekeeper" to do my grocery shopping and cook most of my meals because it's a huge waste of [my] time!
The only reason I still do my own shopping/cooking is because I "enjoy" making/trying certain recipes and like to "control" what I eat. Most people don't realise that the moment they earn more than median wage per hour and can invest marginal hours into developing their skills which will result in even more earnings (or earning potential), they should immediately hire a housekeeper to do all the "chores" and invest their time more wisely. The exact same thing applies to a business/organisation; the moment you realise that your time is being ineffectively expended on lower-value tasks (that you can train someone else to execute to a similar standard) that is the time to comprehensively document the task and start searching for your replacement.
See: "The E-Myth Revisited" by Michael Gerber youtu.be/7YGS3OxJZN4 "The System is the Solution".

https://youtu.be/cjy0shpSh60

The point is that unless you/we track how long a particular task is taking (preferably against an estimate of how long you think it should take) you'll never get to the point of realisation that you are being ineffective with your time.

Example: "Personal Best" Time for Running

Ask anyone who is into running (or any other time-sensitive sport) if they measure how long it takes them to run a specific distance (under normal conditions). Most runners know exactly what their "time" is for running their preferred distance e.g 5k, 10k Half, Full or Ultra Marathon.
The person/people who does not measure their run and/or has no interest in beating their "personal best" will not only fail to improve, they will degrade over time.

Why does the time it took someone to run a mile matter? Surely it's "not important" if they run the mile in 4 minutes or half an hour (i.e. slower than walking speed) ... right? Well no, actually it matters a lot!
If the "runner" is part of a team of people who run together and one person takes 30mins to run the distance that others run in 4 minutes the team as a whole will not be very effective. If one person is not making the effort the others rapidly lose "motivation" even if they were originally psyched to beat a PB.

Conclusion

I know this is probably not the comment/answer you were expecting when you shared the link to the Guardian Article. On the surface the Guardian article seems relevant, but sadly it's a massive red herring. The question it asks (it's hypothesis) is false and thus it has an invalid conclusion.

"The more focused you can be in your work, the more successful you’ll become. Pair your time management initiatives with a laser-like focus and you’re guaranteed to achieve your dreams.
“It’s better to do the right thing slowly than the wrong thing quickly.” ~ Peter Turla

I still think there is a massive gap in the market for an app that isn't a glorified timesheet system where people begrudgingly "clock-in" to keep a "boss" happy, but instead helps people achieve their biggest life and organisational goals. 37% of British workers consider their job "meaningless", for these people tracking their time on activities in order to improve their effectiveness is equally meaningless and they simply won't see the point of it!

"I believe in a future, where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheque, but by the amount of happiness you spread and the amount of meaning you give.
I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job,
but for a life well-lived. I believe in a future where an existence without poverty is not a privilege but a right we all deserve." ~ Rutger Bregman

I believe that accurately and consistently tracking my time is the only way to determine if I am:

• learning fast - a core advantage as described in Cal Newport's "Deep Work".
• spending time effectively, not aimlessly frittering it away on "social media".
• working on the highest value tasks/activities promptly - not doing admin busywork that can/should be done when I have less energy or delegated to someone else so I can focus on deep/creative work!

There will always be people who don't want to track how they are spending their time because they don't want to know the "answer"; they don't want to face the fact that they are wasting 80% of it!
There's a word for them: "Slackers" (people who prefer "chat" or "meetings" over doing deep work)
Those people are in for a very rude (AI) awakening in the next 5-10 years!
Journalists aren't "safe": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_journalism
"Developers" who do not learn to integrate ML/AI in to their apps are also doomed to be replaced!

Further reading:

• Time Management Strategies: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/292112
• Time Management Tips: https://www.timedoctor.com/blog/time-management-tips-entrepreneurs/

Further academic reading on this topic:

• PROCRASTINATION, DEADLINES, AND PERFORMANCE: Self-Control by Precommitment
  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1ace/a08d84d042b2d9802ca3432ee803da698d03.pdf
• The Study Efficacy of Time Management Training on Increase Academic Time Management of Students https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042813015905