Results for “time management” 347 found
Do I wish to revise my time management tips?
Here are my suggestions:
1. There is always time to do more, most people, even the productive, have a day that is at least forty percent slack.
2. Do the most important things first in the day and don’t let anybody stop you. Estimate “most important” using a zero discount rate. Don’t make exceptions. The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.
3. Some tasks (drawing up outlines?) expand or contract to fill the time you give them. Shove all these into times when you are pressed to do something else very soon.
4. Each day stop writing just a bit before you have said everything you want to. Better to approach your next writing day “hungry” than to feel “written out.” Your biggest enemy is a day spent not writing, not a day spent writing too little.
5. Blogging builds up good work habits; the deadline is always “now.”
Rahul R. asks me if I would like to revise the list. I’ll add these:
6. Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t take drugs.
7. At any point in your life, do not be watching more than one television show on a regular basis.
8. Don’t feel you have to finish a book or movie if you don’t want to. I cover that point at length in my book Discover Your Inner Economist.
I think I would take back my old #5, since I observe some bloggers who have gone years, ten years in fact, without being so productive.
My sentence on time management
All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else.
Here are my previous posts on time management, most of all here and yes this is the single most frequent topic question I receive from MR readers. I thank Jacqueline for the query.
Addendum: Will comments, worth reading. My view is simple: forcing yourself to use your time better just isn’t that costly, so if you want to, you can. What does *Getting Things Done* sell for? That’s about its marginal value. It doesn’t reflect a big shift in time use.
Trudie on time management
First, check out Tyler’s earlier tips on time management. Read this one too. That’s right, you. The one who doesn’t usually click on the links. Read them. Don’t tell me you don’t have enough time.
The bigger question is whether time management is something you need to improve. The "Friends" part of your brain sounds quite fundamental, why tamper with it? Don’t think all that Bruckner stuff, or for that matter the Journal of Law and Economics, beats a good TV show. (Even Nigerian movies can be worse than Law and Order, believe it or not!) Cost-benefit analysis suggests that acceptance will come easier than change.
It sounds as if you are already an expert consumer, and indeed consumption is the ultimate goal of economic activity.
Being "completely rational" would be a high form of hell. Tyler tells me that his high levels of cultural consumption are his form of irrationality, not the contrary. And most of his activities are quite passive; he has never been in a kayak, refuses to go "natural diving," and surely blogging does not compare with building a software company or hunting a boar. Don’t confuse a restless nature with seizing life by the throat and living it to the fullest (although, of course, some people do both, including Tyler). In any case the key is to enjoy and indeed cultivate the irrationalities you have (indeed that is all you have), at least provided they do not become destructive vis-a-vis other people.
Trudie again thanks Tim Harford for pioneering the concept of economic advice; Tyler has added Tim’s website to the Interesting People roll on the left hand side of this blog.
Time management tips
John Quiggin offers some time management tips over at CrookedTimber.org. I’ll second his call for a daily "word quota", but express horror at his notion that you should ever devote a morning to "8-10 jobs that ought to take 5 minutes each."
Here are my suggestions:
1. There is always time to do more, most people, even the productive, have a day that is at least forty percent slack.
2. Do the most important things first in the day and don’t let anybody stop you. Estimate "most important" using a zero discount rate. Don’t make exceptions. The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.
3. Some tasks (drawing up outlines?) expand or contract to fill the time you give them. Shove all these into times when you are pressed to do something else very soon.
4. Each day stop writing just a bit before you have said everything you want to. Better to approach your next writing day "hungry" than to feel "written out." Your biggest enemy is a day spent not writing, not a day spent writing too little.
5. Blogging builds up good work habits; the deadline is always "now."
What I’ve been reading and not having time to read
Marcel Proust, The Seventy-Five Folios & Other Unpublished Manuscripts. Early drafts of In Search of Lost Time, fragments, but still of interest to Proust lovers.
Claire Hughes Johnson, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building is that rare thing — a good and also useful management book. She was COO at Stripe, this is a Stripe Press title, and I was happy to see it make the WSJ bestseller list.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? The authors are skeptical on the actual settlement of space, and so am I, so I am glad this book exists. I hope somebody proves them wrong, but that is not my bet.
Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas, Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income, is a good history of ideas on the basic concept.
Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, Superman Brainiac, Superman wins, but is that plausible? Yes. The writers note there is too much that Brainiac cannot control, most of all on Earth.
Peter Attia, with Bill Gifford, has now published Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity.
I have only browsed Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism, but it seems to be a very good and serious treatment of its chosen topics.
Lionel Page, Optimally Irrational: The Good Reasons We Behave the Way We Do, argues that many behavioral “imperfections” in economics are in fact rational in a broader perspective.
Simone and Malcolm Collins, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion, the authors lay out what their version of a pro-natalist world and philosophy would have to look like.
There is Shanker A. Singham and Alden F. Abbott, Trade, Competition and Domestic Regulatory Policy: Trade Liberalisation, Competitive Markets and Property Rights Protection.
I will not have time to read Chris Wickham’s massive tome The Donkey & the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180, but surely it is worthy of note and it appears to be a major achievement.
And Is Social Justice Just?, edited by Robert M. Whaples, Michael C. Munger, and Christopher J. Coyne.
Paul McCartney as management study
I am listening to McCartney III, the new Paul album, recorded at age 78 with Paul playing all of the instruments and doing all of the production at home. There is no “Hey Jude” on here, but it is pretty good and given the broader context it is remarkable. I recently linked to an Ian Leslie post on 64 reasons why Paul is underrated, but I don’t think he comes close to the reality.
Paul has been writing songs and performing since 1956, with no real breaks. Perhaps he has written more hit songs than anyone else. He brought the innovations of Cage and Stockhausen into popular music, despite having no musical education and growing up in the Liverpool dumps. His second act, Wings, sold more records in its time than the Beatles did. On a lark he decided to learn techno/EDM and put out five perfectly credible albums in that area. He decided to learn how to compose classical music, and after some initial missteps his Ecce Cor Meum is perhaps the finest British choral work in a generation, worthy of say Britten or Nicholas Maw. And that is from a guy who can’t really read music. He has learned how to play most of the major musical instruments, typically well. He can compose and play and perform in virtually every musical genre, including heavy metal, blues, music hall, country and western, gospel, show tunes, ballads, rockers, Latin music, pastiche, psychedelia, electronic music, Devo-style robot-pop, drone, lounge, reggae, and more and more and more.
His vocal range once spanned over four octaves, he is sometimes considered the greatest bass player in the history of rock and roll, and he was the first popular musician to truly master the recording studio, again with zero initial technical or musical education of any sort.
He is perhaps the quickest learner the music world ever has seen.
He has collaborated with John Lennon, George Harrison, George Martin, Ravi Shankar, Jimmy McCullough, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, Carl Perkins, Kiri Te Kanawa, David Gilmour, Kanye West, Rihanna, and numerous others. He wrote the best theme song for any James Bond movie. He was the workaholic of the Beatles. He was one of the most influential individuals worldwide, including behind the Iron Curtain, in the 1960s and sometimes beyond.
He was a very keen businessman in buying up the rights to music IP at just the right time, making him a billionaire.
He is OK enough as a painter, has been an effective propagandist for vegetarianism, active in numerous charities, and has put out two (?) children’s books, which I strongly doubt are ghostwritten. He has been very active as a father in raising five children, while touring regularly, often intensely. He had planned to be touring this summer at age 78, with a world class show spanning two and a half hours with Paul taking no break or even letting up (I saw the previous tour).
There is no backward-bending supply curve for this one.
If you are looking to study careers, Paul McCartney’s career is one of the very best and most instructive.
Has the time come and passed for negative interest rates?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Step back and consider the cultural context. Germany is still scarred by the memories of two world wars, fascism, communism, deflation and hyperinflation: in general, huge instability. Since the end of World War II, however, personal savings and the banking system have been an oasis of predictability and a driver of growth. Many Germans treasure their frugality, perhaps excessively or irrationally, and it has become an important part of the narrative Germans tell themselves about the economic order they have built.
Now enter the ECB, in essence telling Germans (and others) that savings are a bad thing, to be taxed and penalized. The very word “negative,” as in “negative interest rate,” makes the policy hard to sell politically. The German word “Strafzinsen” refers to a penalty rate, but the root “Straf” also refers to punishment, and it was used effectively by Franz Kafka in his famous torture-laden short story “In the Penal Colony” (the German title is “In der Strafkolonie”). One German newspaper referred to the “final expropriation” of the German saver, noting that the ECB’s decision to deviate from its inflation target carries “grave consequences.”
More generally, a significant segment of the German population is upset or outraged by the policy. There is even a claim that the revenue from the negative interest payments will be used to finance other EU countries.
Most economists and central bankers view negative interest rates as an acceptable tool of macroeconomic management. Maybe so. But in an era when trust, including trust among nations, is much lower than previously thought, it probably isn’t a good idea to place a punishing new tax on the German national virtue of saving. Central bankers must also be sensitive to public relations.
I find it striking how many people are responding to this column by insisting that Merkel should do more fiscal stimulus. She should (though I don’t find “stimulus” to be the most instructive word here), as I suggest in the piece, because the Germans have been letting their infrastructure run down for a good while now — internet speeds anybody? But at the end of the day, I don’t think that spending will eliminate the basic macroeconomic problem facing the EU, nor is most of that spending likely to land on the doorstep of the countries which most need it (though Huawei may benefit a good deal). There is also this:
So if a policy of negative interest rates is just a Band-Aid, it is one that should be ripped off. And if monetary policy is insufficiently expansionary, that is going to require an increase in the ECB’s inflation target, or a move to nominal GDP targeting, not a jerry-rigged tax on deposits.
There is also an argument that Germans are saving too much. But by some measures, they have a level of national wealth relatively low for their per capita income, in part because Germans are less likely to own their own homes. According to the OECD, Germany’s near neighbors Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland all save more in percentage terms than Germany does.
German savers: underrated.
The new Ben Horowitz management book
What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Own Business Culture. It is the best book on business culture in recent memory, here is one bit:
When Tom Coughlin coached the New York Giants, from 2004 to 2015, the media went crazy over a shocking rule he set: “If you are on time, you are late.” He started every meeting five minutes early and fined players one thousand dollars if they were late. I mean on time…”Players ought to be there on time, period,” he said. “If they’re on time, they’re on time. Meetings start five minutes early.”
And:
Two lessons for leaders jump out from Senghor’s experience:
-
Your own perspective on the culture is not that relevant. Your view or your executive team’s view of your culture is rarely what your employees experience.
You can pre-order the book here, due out in October.
The problem with The Process, toward a theory of management
Re: the rebuilding attempts of the Philadelphia 76ers:
[John] Wall shed light on an underrated issue when he said: “The toughest thing you have is two young players that want to be great. Sometimes it might work, and sometimes it might not work.”
Think about that. Here’s what Wall is saying: It’s easier for stars to coexist when there is more separation of age and aspiration and an understanding of the hierarchy. Wall and Beal figured it out. The Sixers have three young potential all-stars trying to mix individual accolades and team success at once.
Wizards center Marcin Gortat cited asymmetric information:
“You know what the hardest thing for the young man is?” Gortat said during a recent interview. “We all enjoy diamonds. We all enjoy women. We all enjoy cars and beautiful houses, trips, the best parties and the life. The hardest thing is to come at 6 o’clock in the morning to the gym when nobody watches you. It’s easy to play when you have 20,000 people in the stands — women, cheerleaders, actresses, models, front-row celebrities — but it’s really hard to wake up at 6 o’clock in the morning and go to the gym and work on your left hand. This is the hardest part, when nobody’s watching.”
Here is the full Jerry Bewer story. I watched two games with Philadelphia and Milwaukee, to update my knowledge of the NBA a bit, and now I’ll return to my rabbit hole for a while.
My two favorite books about management, ever
They are:
Johnny Rogan, The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited, The Sequel, get the full-length edition, not the much shorter 1980 volume.
Chris Twomey, XTC: Chalkhills and Children.
…in addition to the very recent Dreaming the Beatles, which I just reviewed.
NB: These are music books and I am not even recommending them to most of you. These books only make sense if you already know a good deal about the careers of the artists involved.
Here is my advice on how to find excellent management books and management advice: pick some areas you know fairly well, be it music, sports, military campaigns, a scientific discovery, the making of a historic plane flight, or whatever. Read a very detailed book about that. Think through the lessons of that book(s). Unfortunately, books about corporations so often filter their management information through homilies, hidden agendas, NDAs, ego boosts, paybacks, and other forms of…bullshit. Music and sports books won’t, as they are too concerned with other kinds of stupid filters. But you will get the lowdown on management for the most part.
There are some special reasons why I find the Byrds and XTC fruitful areas for reading for management advice, above and beyond my knowledge of the history and the musical content. Neither group was massively profitable in a sustained manner, though they had their successes. The two histories contain both triumphs and some major mistakes. The main creators worked very consistently at their music for decades, and were not afraid to take chances or to operate with a long time horizon. Nor did they destroy themselves, even though they were fatally flawed as creators. Both histories are also studies in small group dynamics, including their eventual collapse; the Byrds are more a story of changing personnel and its costs. Both histories embody tales of retreat and also return, and an ongoing evolution of styles and media. Both stories have (relatively) happy endings, but only for those who kept at work rather than partook in indulgences. Those features may or may not apply to your own personal circumstances, choose your management books accordingly, but I those kinds of stories more interesting than say books about the Rolling Stones.
If you can find books such as these, they are among the most valuable you will read. Yet it is very hard to find them through recommendations, given the idiosyncratic nature of the content and its relevance. Of course that is precisely why they have such high marginal value.
Charter schools get better over time
There is a new NBER paper by Patrick L. Baude, Marcus Casey, Eric A. Hanushek, and Steven G. Rivkin, the abstract is no surprise but it is nice to see common sense intuition confirmed:
Studies of the charter school sector typically focus on head-to-head comparisons of charter and traditional schools at a point in time, but the expansion of parental choice and relaxation of constraints on school operations is unlikely to raise school quality overnight. Rather, the success of the reform depends in large part on whether parental choices induce improvements in the charter sector. We study quality changes among Texas charter schools between 2001 and 2011. Our results suggest that the charter sector was initially characterized by schools whose quality was highly variable and, on average, less effective than traditional public schools. However, exits from the sector, improvement of existing charter schools, and positive selection of charter management organizations that open additional schools raised average charter school effectiveness over time relative to traditional public schools. Moreover, the evidence is consistent with the belief that a reduction in student turnover as the sector matures, expansion of the share of charters that adhere to a No Excuses philosophy, and increasingly positive student selection at the times of both entry and reenrollment all contribute to the improvement of the charter sector.
There are ungated copies here.
Are economists biased to be pro-management?
Luigi Zingales has a relatively new paper on that and related questions:
The very same forces that induce economists to conclude that regulators are captured should lead us to conclude that the economic profession is captured as well. As evidence of this capture, I show that papers whose conclusions are pro-management are more likely to be published in economic journals and more likely to be cited. I also show that business schools’ faculty write papers that are more pro management. I highlight possible remedies to reduce the extent of this capture: from a reform of the publication process, to an enhanced data disclosure, from a stronger theoretical foundation to a mechanism of peer pressure. Ultimately, the most important remedy, however, is awareness, an awareness most economists still do not have.
The paper is here, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. And here is another new Zingales paper (pdf, with Guiso and Sapienza) on time-varying risk-aversion, here is the tail end of the abstract:
Consistent with a fear-based explanation, we find that subjects who watched a horror movie exhibit a higher risk aversion than subjects who did not. The size of the increase in risk aversion caused by the horror movie is similar to the one experienced by our bank’s clients during the crisis.
Was bailing out Long-Term Capital Management a good idea?
Here is my latest NYT column. It starts as follows:
The financial crisis is a result of many bad decisions, but one of them hasn’t received
enough attention: the 1998 bailout of the Long-Term Capital Management
hedge fund. If regulators had been less concerned with protecting the
fund’s creditors, our current problems might not be quite so bad.
Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers were all major creditors of LTCM. Given that regulation is inevitably imperfect, and cannot foresee or prevent every firestorm in advance, this was one chance to send a very stern message to those creditors. Perhaps no LTCM bailout would have meant dire consequences at the time, but still:
…Fed inaction might have had graver economic consequences,
especially if a Buffett deal had fallen through. In that case, a rapid
financial deleveraging would have followed, and the economy would have
probably plunged into recession. That sounds bad, but it might have
been better to have experienced a milder version of a downturn in 1998
than the more severe version of 10 years later. In 1998, there was no collapsed housing bubble, the government’s budget
was in surplus rather than deficit, bank leverage was much lower, and
derivatives markets were smaller and less far-reaching.
I’ve been reading much about LTCM in recent times, and in so many ways it was a micro- dress rehearsal for our later problems. This column also criticizes the current now-standard practice of "regulation by deal."
Addendum: Matt Yglesias adds: " At the time I think everyone was clear on the idea that if
institutions such as LTCM were “too big to fail” that they had to be
brought into a regulatory umbrella. But as soon as it was clear that
disaster had been averted, a lot of people became complacent about
operationalizing this determination to expand the scope of regulation
and some of the key participants – especially Alan Greenspan – in the
bailout only redoubled their opposition to regulation."
Market based management
The Science of Success: How Market Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company, by Charles Koch, due out this coming Tuesday. This is Koch’s account of how the economics of Hayek and Polanyi (Michael, not Karl!) helped him do it.
Here is Mark Skousen’s class on free market management. Here is a bibliography on Austrian economics and management. Here is Hal Varian on Kaizen, recommended.
How much time do workers spend on the Web?
“It feels both inaccurate and inadequate to describe The Office as a comedy. On a superficial level, it disdains all the conventions of television sitcoms: there are no punch lines, no jokes, no laugh tracks, and no cute happy endings. More profoundly, it’s not what we’re used to thinking of as funny. Most of the fervently devoted fan base watched with a discomfortingly thrilling combination of identification and mortification. The paradox is that its best moments are almost physically unwatchable. Set in the offices of a fictional British paper merchant, The Office is filmed in the style of a reality television show. The writing is subtle and deft, the acting wonderful, and the characters beautifully drawn: the cadaverous team leader Gareth (Mackenzie Crook); the monstrous sales rep, Chris Finch (Ralph Ineson); and the decent but long-suffering everyman Tim (Martin Freeman), whose ambition and imagination have been crushed out of him by the banality of the life he dreams uselessly of escaping. The show is stolen, as it was intended to be, by insufferable office manager David Brent, played by codirector-cowriter Ricky Gervais. Brent will become a name as emblematic for a particular kind of British grotesque as Basil Fawlty, but he is a deeper character. Fawlty is an exaggeration of reality, and therefore a safely comic figure. Brent is as appalling as only reality can be. –Andrew Mueller”
Yes you will find the anti-capitalist mentality in this show, but I doubt if few will walk away with a fervent belief in government planning as the proper response.