How To Escape Calendar Tyranny And Focus On The Future: Go On A Time Diet

Fourth quarter is upon us—the quick run into the holidays when executives’ calendars fill up with meetings about everything from performance appraisals to KPI reviews to budget and product planning for next year.

Some of those meetings will be helpful …but many won’t. That’s because too many of these conversations drag leaders into focusing on what’s already happened rather than helping them focus on shaping the future. And shaping the future is what their organizations need most from them.

In our rapidly changing world, the most successful businesses are those whose leaders spend a significant chunk of their time focused on the future. They need to be addressing the big, thorny questions like “What could kill us in the coming decade?”, “What are the key competitive threats we need to stay ahead of?”, and “How are broader social, technology and economic changes going to create new opportunities for growth?”

Most leaders get this. In fact, a full 40% of CEOs acknowledge that their business won’t be viable in a decade if they stick to their current path. If only they made the time to focus on that problem.

The problem lies with how our brains work. Most people—and most business leaders—are wired to focus on the present. Stanford Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo spent a decade studying what he called people’s “time perspective.” It turns out that some of us tend to get stuck in the past, while some of us are obsessed about what’s going to happen in the future. However, the vast majority of us have a worldview that’s all about the here and now.

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Research conducted by my colleagues at Jump Associates indicates that only 16% of people are truly future-focused, meaning that their reality is framed by what’s going to happen, not just what’s happening right now. They’re the leaders who’ve stopped wondering about whether AI will really be as big as people say and have started putting it to work in their businesses. That same research suggests that nearly 70% of people are present-focused. And when you point out to these folks that the world is changing, their reaction is inevitably, “You’re right. But we need to focus on this quarter.”

Of course, it is possible to change how you think. Neuroplasticity is a beautiful thing. And there are a few simple ways to start retraining your brain to focus more attention on the future. One simple exercise I recommend to clients is to try keeping a time diet.

Tracking Time Like Calories

A time diet is simply about paying more attention to what you’re paying attention to. It’s not unlike what you’d do with a food diet. If you’re looking to lose weight or improve your eating, a personal trainer or nutritionist will often suggest that you start keeping a log of what you eat every day. The same goes for time.

At the end of a day, take a couple of minutes to look back at your calendar. If you’re using Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar, try color-coding each of your meetings and conversations. If a meeting was focused on the past, mark it blue. If it was about the present, mark it green. If a meeting was mostly focused on the future, mark it orange.

It’s important to categorize your time accurately. If you spent an hour giving an update on last quarter’s sales numbers, that was a conversation about the past. If you’re reviewing an upcoming product launch, that’s really about the present. Be strict. Only mark things as future-focused if you were thinking about something that’s more than a year or two out. For example, planning this winter’s holiday promotions is really thinking about the present, especially if you’re going to start working on it right away. Likewise, discussions about closing a sale, meeting a deadline, or even the strategic plan for next year all get marked as present-focused, despite the temptation to think of them as the future.

Reserve your orange color for time that is truly devoted to thinking about the future at least three years out. For example, meetings about the company’s long-term product pipeline, building a new plant, or entering an emerging market would all make the grade.

And when you look back at your calendar after two or three weeks, don’t be bummed out by what you find.

Reviewing their time diets, leaders are often surprised to see how little of their days are spent on truly future-focused activities. For many, it’s only around 5%. They spend another 20% of their days reviewing the past, and as much as 75% of their time dealing with the present. That happens because that’s how most of our brains are wired.

How Much is Enough?

Candidly, it’s hard to define an ideal mix of time focus for everyone. A management team in the midst of a turnaround probably needs to spend most of their time on the here and now. But technology leaders and investment teams should probably be spending more time on the future. And for most business leaders, spending 5% of your time focused on the future isn’t enough. You probably have plenty of people who are handling the day-to-day. Those people (as well as your investors) are counting on you to pay attention to what’s happening next.

Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page once shared his advice about focusing on the future. He remembered how guilty he felt for spending half a day every week working on a mobile operating system that was a pet project of his. Meanwhile, the everyday demands of the company were screaming for his attention. Looking back, however, he was grateful that he spent that time on what ultimately became Google’s Android platform. Because Android was part of Google’s future. The takeaway? If you don’t feel guilty about how much time you’re spending on the future, you’re probably not doing it enough.

Tapping The Power Of Self-Observation

Expecting a new color scheme on your calendar to have a drastic impact on your way of working may seem too good to be true. But it works because it taps into a powerful psychological dynamic that has been supported by multiple studies over the years. Put simply, having our behavior tracked nudges people to do better.

A 2019 meta-analysis of 41 health studies found that self-monitoring food consumption through app-based tools significantly improved people’s dietary habits. Anyone who has tracked their daily steps or worn a glucose monitor can testify that self-observation works. When I first bought my Toyota Prius twenty years ago, the novelty of having my gas mileage constantly displayed on my dashboard made me mildly obsessed with getting my fuel efficiency as high as possible, something I’d barely thought about before.

The Call of the Present

The problem, of course, is that our schedules constantly pull us to putting out today’s fires or explaining the results of yesterday’s actions. And we have a whole system, from weekly meetings to earnings calls that are geared toward a short-term focus. A few years back, Arun Sarin, then CEO of Vodafone, told me that when he first started the job, his calendar had already been blocked out for the coming year, with only four days left to his discretion. That’s a hard system to fight.

And while Larry Page’s Android story might offer some inspiration, the goal isn’t to have a completely different set of meetings. It’s about changing your mindset in the meetings you’re already having. A performance review with one of your direct reports could be narrowly focused on what they achieved over the past year. Or it could be a great mentoring conversation about where they’d like to be in three years and what they need to do to get there. A meeting about why the last quarter was so bad is an opportunity to discuss how to bring things back to health and to build on that into the following year and beyond. Don’t just change what meetings you have. Change how you think in those meetings.

Without a doubt, this is hard stuff. The world is constantly pulling us to fight fires today. But people are counting on their leaders to be more future-focused. And that change can start with a little diet.