Web Worker Daily

Here at WWD, we’ve published almost innumerable tips on time management. We’re certainly not alone in this; there are many resources to help you make better use of your time, track your tasks more efficiently, clean up your inbox, and work at the peak of your game all the time. But as we enter a three-day weekend (at least here in the States) perhaps it’s an appropriate point to step back and ask a more fundamental question: why?

The simplest starting answer is with the old cliche that “time is money.” As you grow more efficient at managing your time, you can devote more of it to tasks that other people are willing to pay you for. In addition, you can complete those tasks more quickly, and so raise your effective billing rate if you’re performing any sort of fixed-price work, or justify charging premium prices if you’re on hourly rates. But that’s hardly the whole story.

When you get down to it, in fact, time is not money. You get 24 hours a day of it, and no matter how much you’re willing to spend, your personal stock of time is not going to be increased. Better management of one part of your routine (such as reading and responding to email) frees up more time for you to use for some other purpose, but it’s a zero-sum game. The question is, if better time management gains you one or two or four hours a day, will you turn those hours into more work time, or use them for something else? If you’ve ever been in starving startup mode, it’s hard to turn down work, as Deane from Gadgetopia points out - even if you’re no longer starving.

The slippery notion of work-life balance comes into this discussion as well. There are web workers who argue strenuously that you should try to keep work separate from the rest of life, and others who seek for an integration of the two. Are you trying to manage your time better so that you can wrest time from one bucket and put it into another? Or is there another reason perhaps more concerned with process than with outcome?

One reason to manage your time more efficiently is simple pride in a job well done: most people like to be better at what they do. Just as gourmet meals win out over fast food, and natty dress makes many people feel better about themselves than old jeans and ratty t-shirts, having a set of systems that hum along well can provide a continuous daily boost to your self-image. And yet, it’s possible to take this too far. Get too ruthless about writing one-line email replies, ignoring people in the name of efficiency, and strip away all the social pleasantries because they take too long, and you may find yourself widely disliked by your business contacts.

There’s another trap to watch out for, too. It’s easy to get so distracted by all the neat management ideas and systems coming along that you spend all your time setting up and managing systems. When a timesaver doesn’t actually save you time, there’s something wrong. Whatever your attitude towards time management, it helps to periodically review what you’re doing to make sure you haven’t drifted off the track.

And that’s good advice in the larger context, as well. This weekend, when you’ve got a few moments free from the end-of-summer barbecue, you might consider using them to think about time management in your own life. If you’ve been following all of our great advice and your web work is humming along efficiently, are you doing the right thing with the time you’ve gained for yourself? Will you look back on this year as a success? With the potential of web work to promote increased workplace freedom, it would be a shame if we only used it to boost ourselves on to more efficient treadmills.