Time management: can a task list be trusted with your commitments?
Professional commitments are scattered across email, project tools and personal notes. The management question is specific: under what conditions does a list become a reliable aid to organising work, rather than another repository?
What the literature establishes
Evan F. Risko and Sam J. Gilbert (2016, Trends in Cognitive Sciences) review research on cognitive offloading: using an action or an external resource to reduce a task’s cognitive demands. Recording a commitment in a tool follows this logic, since remembering it no longer depends entirely on internal memory. This review does not, however, demonstrate that a task management application alone improves prioritisation at work.
Remembering where to look rather than remembering the content
Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel M. Wegner (2011, Science) show in their experiments that expecting to retrieve information later changes how it is remembered. Participants remember some information less well when they believe it will be saved, while its storage location can be remembered better than its content. Applied to a list of commitments, this mechanism suggests an important consideration: a reliable retrieval path matters as much as the ability to record something.
The premature conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that recording everything in a single tool is enough. The cited research supports neither prescribing one universal tool nor claiming that an exhaustive list leads to better trade-offs. Externalising a commitment helps preserve it; deciding where it belongs in the work remains a separate operation. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
Experiments on remembering information do not reproduce the negotiated, changing and interdependent commitments of a team. The review of cognitive offloading covers varied situations without establishing a validated protocol for managing priorities in organisations. In practice, counting recorded tasks is therefore insufficient: a long list may still be incomplete or no longer consulted.
A practical check in Lausanne
As part of SHR’s time management and prioritisation programme, an exercise could be offered in Lausanne to teams in medtech, higher education, international sport and the Lake Geneva region’s scale-ups. For two weeks, each participant would check their working list daily against outstanding commitments that have been explicitly accepted and given a deadline, within an agreed scope of emails and tickets. The measure is the proportion of those commitments missing from the list: the number of missing commitments divided by the number of eligible commitments identified in the sources, with confidential content remaining with the participant. This rate checks the coverage of the reminder system, not the quality of priorities; a decrease would be useful, but would not prove a productivity gain. To go further: explore the Time Management & Prioritisation training in Lausanne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Time Management & Prioritisation in Lausanne
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