Time management: who can actually decide what goes in their calendar?
A calendar can be carefully organised while remaining subject to other people's decisions. The management question is specific: what authority should a team give its members so that their priorities can genuinely shape how they spend their time?
What the literature establishes
Robert Karasek (1979, Administrative Science Quarterly) examines job demands, decision latitude and psychological strain together. His findings associate the combination of high demands and low decision latitude with greater strain. However, the latitude examined extends beyond the freedom to move appointments: this study is not an evaluation of planning methods.
The schedule as a collective arrangement
Leslie Perlow (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) studies the chronic sense of having too little time among a group of product development engineers. Her field research shows how interaction practices and collective expectations help reproduce this situation. An experiment with protected working periods in that setting suggests that changing how time is used also requires changes to collective rules on availability.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that everyone should simply be free to organise their own calendar. That would confuse individual latitude with the collective capacity to meet commitments: some shared availability remains necessary. The issue is instead to specify what a person may move, decline or renegotiate, and when a manager must make the decision. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot prescribe
Karasek's study rests on associations that cannot, on their own, establish the causal effect of greater control over one's schedule. Perlow's field research illuminates a mechanism in a particular setting without establishing a universal rule on availability. Neither study identifies an optimal proportion of freely schedulable time; nor does labelling a time slot as protected demonstrate that its holder can actually defend it.
A practical check in Lausanne
Within SHR's “Time Management & Prioritisation” programme, one possible exercise in Lausanne is to test decision rights over schedules in a medtech team, a higher education institution, an international sports organisation or a scale-up in the Lake Geneva region. For two weeks, record every request from someone else that leads a person to change a time slot allocated to an agreed priority, distinguishing requests they could renegotiate without permission from those requiring approval. Then calculate the share of changes for which independent renegotiation was authorised, also reporting the raw counts and any unmet commitments. Use this record to select one decision rule to clarify, then repeat the observation; it is neither an individual performance score nor proof of a causal effect. 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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