Time management: can we trust our memory of the working week?
When teams review their priorities, they often rely on what seems to have absorbed their week. The management question is specific: is that recollection a sufficient basis for reallocating working time?
What the literature establishes
Richard A. Block and Dan Zakay (1997, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review) distinguish, in a meta-analysis, between prospective duration judgments, when people know they will need to estimate time, and retrospective judgments, when they only discover this after the activity. Their synthesis shows that these situations draw differently on attention and memory. Asking on Friday “where did our time go?” is therefore not equivalent to observing its allocation as work unfolds.
What stands out does not necessarily last longest
Barbara L. Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman (1993, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) studied retrospective evaluations of affective episodes using film clips. In their experiments, duration carried little weight in the overall evaluation, whereas particular moments of the experience, notably its peak intensity and its ending, contributed to the judgment. This concerns affective evaluation, not a count of hours: a memorable episode and a time-consuming activity are not interchangeable categories.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that every team review should be replaced with a time log. These studies do not justify that conclusion: they demonstrate neither that every recollection of work is wrong nor that exhaustive tracking improves prioritisation decisions. Recollection provides information about lived experience; an activity record provides information about time allocation, without by itself establishing the value of the work performed. (our executive and employee training programmes)
The limits of a review from memory
These studies do not directly measure the reliability of recalling a working week in a Lausanne organisation. Applying their findings is a hypothesis to test, not a numerical correction to impose on team accounts. Records themselves remain imperfect: simultaneous activities, ambiguous categories and forgotten entries may shift the problem rather than resolve it.
A practical check in Lausanne
As part of SHR’s “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, a Lausanne team — in medtech, higher education, international sport or a Lake Geneva region scale-up — can trial a lightweight check over two weeks. The team defines a few shared activity categories, after which each person records the corresponding durations daily and, at the end of the week without consulting the record, estimates the share of time spent in each category. The measure is the difference, in percentage points, between the recalled and recorded shares, category by category; a consistent classification rule prevents simultaneous activities from being counted twice. A category showing a recurring discrepancy can then be examined before changing the calendar, with its time demands, importance and experienced difficulty discussed separately. 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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