8/18/15, 2:05 PMDo time management apps really make people more productive? | Business | The Guardian

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Do time management apps really make peoplemore productive?Employees are using time management apps to make better use of the working day. But dothey really work – and are they too Big Brother?

Leah Messinger

A freelance reporter who has written for Newsday, The New York Times Magazine and The San Francisco ChronicleMagazine

Tuesday 18 August 2015 10.44 EDT

A ndrew Chen, an investor in the San Francisco Bay Area, used to think that reaching zero inone’s inbox was folklore. The tech entrepreneur now uses an app, Streak, to regularlyclear his emails. He also gets all his scheduling done with the help of another digital time

manager, Esper.

Time management apps have proliferated over the past few years as consumers increasinglytry to squeeze more productivity out of their waking – and even sleeping – hours. Users hopingto curtail their time on Facebook and squeeze in more hours at the gym have flocked to appslike RescueTime and Toggl. You define the tasks and set the app to measure how long youspend on them.

“For me, time management tools are super important,” Chen said. “When you are in [a] techjob, the scarcest thing is your own attention and other peoples’ attention. Money isn’t usuallythe bottleneck. So you need tools to help manage this scarce resource, so you can maximize it.”

People have always sought to maximize their 24 hours. Now, where analog to-do-lists oncesufficed, the toolbox for increasing efficiency has greatly expanded.

Data gathering is the first step. “In the United States, there is this big wave of self-quantification,” said Khiv Singh, an assistant vice president at Sapience, which recentlylaunched a personal time management tool called Sapience Buddy. Although the majority ofhis company’s clients are in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe, he said Americans were theones requesting a way to track personal data.

“There’s nothing especially new about the desire to be productive,” said Melissa Gregg, aprincipal engineer at Intel who is researching the future of work and is author of the

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forthcoming book Counterproductive, which focuses on time management at work. “It’s morewe have the technology and capacity to do that in more interesting ways.” Gregg and her teamrecently reviewed 50 time management apps and found that they ranged from calendaring,note taking and file-sharing tools to mindfulness meditation apps that remind users to takebreaks and stay focused.

Developers of some of the most popular personal time management apps, such as Timely,ATracker and Toggl, are now creating or expanding office versions for business customers bythe end of the year.

Because apps that make people feel like they’re squeezing more into each day can lead to a die-hard customer base, many of these companies are counting on their existing users topassionately promote their apps to their employers when the subjects of productivity andprioritizing arise in the office.

Done right, Gregg said: “It actually does take the place of a spiritual or religious dimension forsome people.” As an internal exercise, Gregg said her team recently held a pitching panel inwhich each employee could advocate for the adoption of his or her favorite app.

Time management tools designed for an office may be more complex than those for personaluse, and they may also need to accommodate different types of data reporting. For example, acompany has to choose between apps that live on an employee’s hard drive and those thatstore information in the cloud.

An effective business app also needs to separate personal from professional tasks and let anemployee choose to report only work-related data to avoid potential violations of privacy orother legal grey areas. A product that works well for some employees and managers may alsobe less effective for others, depending on the variety of work styles and culture within anorganization.

Developers of time management apps are considering all of these questions as they expandtheir product offerings and using feedback from early adopters to help work out bugs andaccommodate a wide range of tasks.

“We want to end up at the large corporations,” said Mathias Mikkelsen, CEO and founder ofTimely, which is mostly used by the self-employed, such as writers and marketers. “It’s waybetter to start with the individual view. Nail that experience, and then go at the wholecompany.”

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

“There’s really not that much good research around on these apps, especially because they’reso different from each other,” said Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and

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co-founder of Timeful, a time management system that was acquired by Google in May. Googlesaid in a statement that it planned to incorporate Timeful’s features into its inbox andcalendaring systems in addition to other products.

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

Here are some guidelines from time management experts for individuals and companiesseeking to adopt better time management practices.

Look at the big pictureThe ideal time management app should help an employee focus on what he or she wants toachieve, not just keep track of their minutes.

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

Setting priorities requires a fair amount of offline thinking and decision-making about what’simportant in a day, a week or a year. Managers should not expect apps to replace theirdiscussions with employees about planning work and setting deadlines.

“Time management apps are very good at managing time if you already decide you want tospend X amount of time on something,” Gregg said. “But it’s still up to the human to prioritizethe task – to make sure the thing you choose to do is really the most important thing to do rightnow.”

Give employees controlThere tends to be a reflexive “ick” response from workers when they think their bosses couldbe peeking into their time management tools to learn about their work habits or how theyspend their personal time. “I would be very worried as an employee once I start turning onsomething that monitors my online activity,” said Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at theUniversity of California at Irvine.

One way to prevent any real or perceived privacy intrusion is to let an employee know how andwhen he’s being tracked, and to let him be the one who directs that information back to hisemployer.

Some employers prefer apps that allow different levels of oversight. For example, ATracker,which is used by some hospitals, lets healthcare providers decide what information they wantto track, such as the time spent on an operation or with a patient, but the hospitals can let thedoctors decide when and whether to generate reports from that data and send them to

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administrators, founder Jian Yan said.

An employee should also be able to sit with the data before sending and be able to decide whento hit the send button. If the employee does not feel he has time to review the data, then hemay lose hours of his workday trying to make himself look productive instead of beingproductive.

“When we make that data transparent to others, that’s where we get into a situation where westart manipulating our activities to create good data,” said Ethan Bernstein, an assistantprofessor at Harvard Business School who has studied workplace transparency. “If you’rerunning experiments on how you’re managing your time, you tend to want the results to beyours before someone comes and questions you about them.”

Companies like Twitter, Uber and Foursquare use lower tech apps like iDoneThis, whichgenerates an evening email reminder that employees respond to with a summary of what theyaccomplished that day. The idea is to motivate employees to get more done because they knowthe email is coming.

“It’s more of a lightweight way to see what everyone is working on. It doesn’t have a lot ofthose negative connotations,” said Walter Chen, iDoneThis co-founder.

Listen to employee feedbackBecause many individuals already use time management apps, it may be hard for businesses toconvince their employees to switch to a different system at work from the ones they alreadyuse on their own. The best time management system works because it becomes part of anemployee’s daily ritual, so swapping a new ritual for a less appealing alternative mightnegatively impact productivity.

The guiding principal behind time management is to restore a person’s sense of control to herday. “You lose the benefit if you make it compulsory,” Gregg said.

You also lose the benefit if the app becomes the day’s focal point. Time management toolsshould be a means to increased productivity, not just another task to accomplish beforeheading home from work. If an app becomes a distraction, it’s probably better to go back to penand paper and write an old-fashioned to-do list.

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