Stop Wasting Money on Time Management Courses That Don’t Work

The productivity guru standing at the front of the conference room looked like he’d never worked a real day in his life.

The dirty secret of the productivity industry? Half these experts have never run a business or dealt with real workplace chaos.

I’ve been advising businesses across Melbourne for fifteen years now, and I can tell you that most time management training completely misses the point. The issue isn’t that people don’t know how to use calendars or make lists. The real issue is that modern workplaces are utterly broken systems that no amount of personal productivity hacks can fix.

Take the classic “prioritisation matrix” that every trainer loves to drag out. You know the one – urgent versus important, colour-coded quadrants, the whole nine yards. Sounds fantastic in theory. But when your boss interrupts you every fifteen minutes, three different departments need “urgent” reports by COB, and your email inbox is exploding faster than you can clear it, that pretty matrix becomes about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

The first thing I tell clients is to stop buying into the myth that you can somehow become so efficient that you’ll magically have more hours in the day.

Time is the one resource that’s completely democratic. Everyone gets exactly 24 hours, whether you’re running a multinational corporation or flipping burgers at Maccas.

Real time management is about managing your mental resources. I figured out this the hard way after burning out utterly in my early thirties. Back then, I was consumed with squeezing every second of productivity from my day. Complex productivity systems, rigid time allocation, obsessive planning – you name it, I tested it.

The breakthrough came when I started paying attention to when I really did my best work, rather than when I thought I should be working. Turns out, I’m completely useless after 3 PM for anything requiring deep thinking, but I can power through administrative tasks like nobody’s business.

Most people are the opposite – they hit their stride in the afternoon and struggle with morning focus. Yet every workplace expects everyone to be equally productive from 9 to 5. It’s madness when you think about it.

The biggest mistake in conventional time management thinking? they assume everyone’s job is the same.

A accountant working in deep focus mode has completely different time management challenges than a project coordinator who’s constantly interrupted by clients and colleagues. Yet somehow, we’re all supposed to follow the same productivity formula.

I was working with a client in Perth last year – brilliant woman running a mid-sized logistics company. She’d been through three different time management programs and felt like a complete failure because none of the techniques worked for her. The problem? She was trying to apply strategies designed for knowledge workers to a role that required constant communication and quick decision-making.

Once we redesigned her approach around managing interruptions rather than eliminating them, everything changed. Her stress levels dropped, her team became more efficient, and she stopped feeling guilty about not following some guru’s perfect daily routine.

Let me tell you about the most effective time management strategy I’ve ever encountered, and it’s probably not what you’d expect.

Learn to say no. Properly.

Not the wishy-washy “I’m really busy right now” nonsense that leaves the door open for negotiation. I mean the direct, confident, guilt-free no that protects your time like a security guard at Crown Casino.

The psychology of saying no is fascinating. Most people fear that declining requests will damage relationships or harm their career prospects. In reality, the opposite is true. Stakeholders respect clear boundaries far more than they respect martyrs who take on everything and deliver nothing well.

Complete bollocks, if you ask me. I’ve watched brilliant professionals destroy their effectiveness and their mental health because they couldn’t bring themselves to reject requests that weren’t really their responsibility. The result? Critical work gets pushed aside while they scramble to complete tasks that should never have landed on their desk in the first place.

Now, this might ruffle some feathers: sometimes the problem isn’t external demands – it’s your own inability to let go of control.

I see this especially with small business owners who’ve built their identity around being indispensable. They whinge about being overwhelmed while concurrently micromanaging every detail and refusing to delegate meaningful work.

Delegation isn’t about dumping tasks on subordinates. It’s about developing capability across your team while freeing yourself to focus on what only you can do. The companies that do this well – think Atlassian or Canva – create systems where success doesn’t depend on any single person being a superhero.

But delegation requires letting go of the illusion that you’re the only person who can do things properly. For many leaders, that’s a harder psychological shift than learning any productivity technique.

Technology deserves a special mention here because it’s both the solution and the problem.

We have more ways to manage our time than ever before, yet we’re more distracted than previous generations. The typical professional checks email every six minutes and flips between applications over 300 times per day.

Digital interruptions from multiple platforms and communication channels – our devices have become attention-destroying machines disguised as productivity tools.

The productivity app industry has convinced us that the solution to complexity is more complexity. It’s like trying to solve traffic congestion by building more roads – you just create more places for things to get stuck.

Every tool was supposed to make them more efficient, but the cognitive overhead of maintaining multiple systems was exhausting them. We stripped it back to three core tools and saw immediate improvements in both output and stress levels.

Here’s what actually works in the real world:

Start with energy, not time. Figure out your peak performance windows and schedule accordingly.

Energy management crushes time management every single time. I’ve seen business owners dramatically increase their effectiveness just by aligning their most demanding work with their natural energy peaks.

Block that time for your most important work and watch your productivity soar. The afternoon slump isn’t a character flaw – it’s biology. Instead of fighting it with caffeine and willpower, schedule your routine tasks for those lower-energy periods. It’s not rocket science, but most people never bother to pay attention to their own patterns.

Second, embrace the reality of interruptions rather than pretending they don’t exist.

If you’re in a role where people need access to you, stop pretending you can work in uninterrupted four-hour blocks. Schedule buffer time between meetings and use those moments productively when they don’t get filled with urgent requests.

The companies that handle this well create communication protocols that distinguish between truly urgent issues and everything else. At Woolworths, for example, they’ve developed clear escalation paths so that frontline staff know when to interrupt senior management and when to handle issues independently.

It’s not about being unavailable – it’s about being strategically available at the right times for the right reasons. Both are equally important parts of their role.

Third, audit your commitments ruthlessly.

Most people have no idea where their time actually goes. They think they’re spending two hours on important projects when they’re actually spending twenty minutes on projects and ninety minutes on email, messages, and random interruptions.

I use a simple exercise with clients: for one week, track everything in 15-minute blocks. Don’t change your behaviour, just observe it. The results are usually shocking.

People discover they’re spending three hours a day on activities that add zero value to their work or their company’s goals. The revelation isn’t pleasant, but it’s necessary. You can’t fix what you don’t measure. Once you see how much time you’re losing to pointless meetings and digital distractions, making changes becomes a lot easier.

Here’s the perspective change that transforms everything:

Most time management problems are systems problems, not people problems. If everyone in your organisation is struggling with the same issues, the solution isn’t better individual time management – it’s better organisational design.

Some organisations are structurally incapable of supporting good time management. No amount of personal productivity techniques can overcome toxic cultures that reward busyness over results, or management styles that create artificial urgency around everything.

The solution wasn’t more training – it was better systems, clearer expectations, and leadership that actually understood the difference between urgent and important.

Look, I’m not saying personal time management skills don’t matter.

The fundamentals work: clear priorities, regular reviews, saying no to non-essential work. But they only work when they’re supported by sensible organisational structures and realistic expectations about what any individual can actually control.

After seventeen years in this industry, I’ve learned that the best time managers aren’t the busiest people – they’re the people who’ve figured out what really matters and built their lives around protecting that focus.

True time management wisdom isn’t about doing more – it’s about doing the right things well, and having the courage to stop doing everything else.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me twenty years ago: it’s not about managing time at all. It’s about managing yourself, your energy, and your environment to support the work that actually matters.

Everything else is just productivity theatre.

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