Charlotte Blank, Laura M. Giurge, Laurel Newman and Ashley Whillans* say ‘pro-time’ can solve the problem of people favouring easy tasks over important ones.
It’s 9 am on a Monday and you just arrived at work.
Your to-do list for the week seems endless.
Which tasks should you focus on first?
The approach that many of us too often default to is checking off tasks that are easiest to complete or are due first, regardless of importance – a phenomenon that scholars describe as the “mere urgency” effect.
In 2018 researchers documented this effect across five experiments in which they asked participants to make trade-off decisions between tasks that varied in urgency and importance.
Urgent tasks expired faster, whereas important tasks paid more.
They found that people favoured urgent tasks over important ones – even when these tasks paid less.
It seems that we pay more attention to time when we feel like we have less of it.
So, when we feel busy, we are more likely to favour urgent, unimportant tasks.
This tendency becomes stronger the busier we are.
When we have a lot of tasks to do and not enough time to do them (what researchers call “time poverty”), we don’t have the bandwidth to determine the relative importance of each of our tasks.
We focus on what we can quickly cross off our list to feel more in control over our busy schedules.
But constantly prioritising urgent tasks means that important tasks that have no urgent deadline get pushed aside.
Some just never get done.
What can managers do to help employees combat the very natural tendency to put off for tomorrow what isn’t due today?
Our latest research suggests a simple solution: have employees set aside time for work that is important but not urgent.
We call this proactive time or pro-time.
We conducted a study with a group of 46 full-time employees.
We randomly assigned half of the employees to a pro-time condition, where they were instructed to set up a recurring 30-minute weekly planning session on their calendars.
During this session, employees were asked to make a list of their most important and urgent work tasks, to block out two hours in their calendars each day for the next two to three weeks, and to fill out these “pro-time” calendar blocks with important, but non-urgent, tasks.
This way, when employees’ pro-time period began, they were ready to focus on activities that involved more of a heavy lift.
The other employees were assigned to our control group — they were not asked to engage in the pro-time procedure.
Before the pro-time period began, we asked both groups of employees to respond to a survey capturing how they felt about their stress, productivity, time management, workload, and responsiveness to clients.
Six weeks later, we asked them to complete the same questions.
After six weeks of the pro-time procedure, employees in our “pro-time” condition reported being 14 per cent more effective with their time.
They also reported being 9 per cent less overwhelmed by workload and 12 per cent more likely to accomplish more, meet important deadlines, and get important tasks done faster.
By contrast, employees in the control condition reported being 6 per cent less effective with their time, 10 per cent more overwhelmed by workload and 4 per cent less productive.
We also found that the employees who benefited the most from “pro-time” were those who seemed to be the most pressed for time.
Most relevant for organisations, employees in both groups were equally responsive to clients’ requests.
Pro-time did not come at the cost of good customer service.
Employees in the pro-time group also felt happier about their work overall.
Among those in the pro-time group, 84 per cent recommended that the method be used across their organisation.
Additional studies are needed to understand how employees use pro-time periods, how long-lasting these effects are, and whether there are benefits outside work.
But overall, our findings suggest that helping employees be intentional and disciplined with their time can increase wellbeing, happiness and even productivity.
How to use pro-time effectively
For pro-time to be effective, it must be distraction-free: no email, no text messages.
Research suggests that the sense of being always on affects our productivity; we need time to stop thinking of one task before we can fully shift our attention to the next.
For that reason, employers must ensure that employees are able to turn off all distractions where possible, block the pro-time in their calendar and be allowed to focus on the tasks they scheduled for each pro-time period.
Employers also need to be mindful that some employees like to schedule their time based on the clock, others like to schedule their time based on events.
Managers will want to consider additional questions like, should we block pro-time on employees’ calendars to make the process even easier?
Are pro-time periods necessary each workday to see positive results?
Is two hours too much or too little?
More research is needed to understand how the procedure works in different contexts, who benefits most from it, and what are the pro-time best practices.
But, in the meantime, try blocking time for important non-urgent tasks for yourself.
* Charlotte Blank is chief behavioural officer of Maritz. Laura M. Giurge is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at London Business School. Laurel Newman is a behavioural scientist at Maritz. Ashley Whillans is an Assistant Professor in the Negotiations, Organisations, and Markets Unit at the Harvard Business School.
This article first appeared at hbr.org
