Steal this author's Jedi trick to help employees (or kids) manage their time better

Let's say you have an employee (or teenager) who is a disaster when it comes to time management. Work is late or not at all, everything is always in a hurry and real priorities are neglected in favor of short-term pleasures or uselessness. How can you help them change their habits?

Your first instinct might be to threaten and complain, but when it comes to getting others to change their behavior, nagging them doesn't work. If you have not already observed this truth in your own life, the experts can confirm it.

"You may have someone you are married to or someone in your family who you think needs to be more active or eat better or whatever either. What you'll probably fail to do incredibly is nag them until they do it. It doesn't work," psychologist BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, said in an interview a few years ago. Speeches of shame and motivation also have a low probability of success.

So what works? When it comes to time management specifically (Fogg has tips for losing weight and exercising), there's no one better to ask than Laura Vanderkam, a time-use expert who posted on how to make the most of what is allocated to us. every week. On Medium, she recently shared a brilliant tip to inspire others to better manage their time.

To talk about it, talk about yourself first.

The problem with harassing or even coaching those who have trouble managing their time is defensiveness. We all tend to put up walls and block our ears when we feel criticized. Vanderkam agrees with Fogg that "people change, but only because they want to change, not because someone else has harassed them enough."

So how do you start a meaningful conversation that might actually inspire someone to change their habits? Vanderkam's trick is to spin the conversation around you.

As someone who writes a lot about the use of time, Vanderkam has been tracking his own time for seven years. This level of self-monitoring may be beyond most of us, but Vanderkam urges those trying to help others master their time to first track their own use of time for a week.

"It would be incredibly invasive for you to ask someone in a dependent position to share their time log with you. But your time log provides a similar opening for discussion. Share what you can with the other person," she instructs. Obviously, leave out anything sensitive or personal, but try to provide as much detail as possible.

Talk about all the highlights of the week: Explain why you left early or worked really late one day, or point out when urgent business came up and you juggled your work day. time on the fly. Then, ask for feedback with questions such as, "What surprises you? What do you think is working well? What do you think I can improve? Is there anything something you think I'm spending too much time on? What areas should I give more time to?"

People may hate unsolicited advice, but almost everyone loves an unvarnished look at the realities and trade-offs of someone else's life. Leaders can count on this tendency to have a meaningful conversation about the use of time. And once that conversation is underway, it's easy to slip in lessons about better prioritization or find your way to a discussion about the challenges the other person is facing with prioritization. You may even notice ways to improve your own use of time in the process.

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