Have you ever tried to implement strategies for managing your time better? If you're listening to How I Work, I imagine that the answer is yes. But can you become happier in your job simply by being better at time management? And could that actually plead to you being happier in life in general. Well, that's exactly what we're going to look at in today's show. My name is doctor Amantha Imber.
I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is How I Work, a show
about how to help you do your best work. Almost three years ago now at Inventium, we designed a program called our Workday Reinvention Program, which was all about helping people work more productively and teaching them to engage in more deep work and prioritize deep work over shallow work, and work to the Krona type and a lot of the sorts of things that I talk about on the podcast. The program is still running and it's probably the most
popular program that we do now at Inventium. The productivity increases that we can get over a five week period are huge. They're generally over twenty percent, but here's what I found interesting. I remember in our very first pilot program that we did with a big law firm, the thing that increased the most was not actually productivity, but
job satisfaction. So what we found is that simply by changing the way people approach their job, as opposed to changing their job in any way, they actually became a whole lot happier with what they were doing. Our last week, one of the organizational psychologists on my team, Charlotte, sent me some research that's just been published that mirrored this finding. So in a meta analysis published in Plus, Brad Aon from Concordia University and colleagues were keen to explore the
impact of good time management. They looked at one hundred and fifty eight different research papers that had been published over the last four decades that had measured time management and looked at what it led to. So, just so we're clear about what time management is, it's assessed through asking questions like do you have a daily routine, do you find it hard to say no to people? And
do you evaluate your daily schedule? Now, not surprisingly, they found that good time management had a positive impact on work performance, or be it a moderate one. But what really surprised the researchers was that the strongest link they found was between good time management and well being. So the effect of time management on life satisfaction was actually seventy two percent stronger than what it was on jobs. At a faction, time management also reduced feelings of distress.
So overall, the research shows that time management does indeed work, But contrary to popular belief, it's our well being, how good we feel on a day to day basis, that has impacted the most as opposed to our work performance. Now, work and well being are obviously clearly linked. You know, we spend a third of our waking hours at work, so if you're having a crappy time at work, you're probably not going to be super happy in your life.
But what's really interesting is that the results suggests that wellbeing is not simply a byproduct of a successfully managed work life, but can be a direct result of good time management. So for me, when I kept reading these results in our research at Inventium, through the Workday Reinvention program and then in this matter analysis, it really made me reframe how I think about time management and productivity.
Tips ultimcgain is bigger than just work performance. What can actually be achieved is better life performance, and who doesn't want that? How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support from Dead Said Studios. And thank you to Martin Nimber who did the audio mix and makes everything sound awesome. And that is it for today and I will see you next time. Passssssssssssssssssss