Stop being a hamster!

I recently ran a HESPA training course about the annual planning cycle with Steve Chadwick from the University of Bristol. At one point, we asked the question, "What has changed since last year and how does that affect the planning cycle?" This sparked a great conversation, but ironically, we ran out of time to explore one of the issues most concerning me over the past year: "With the increase in pace, how do we make time for strategic thinking?"

An easy answer to the question "How are you?" is "Busy". But over the past couple of years, people have started to look at each other with slightly frantic, hollowed-out gazes and mutter, "I keep thinking the pace can't get greater, and then it does." The hamster wheel has reached such a pace that our little legs can't keep up any more. The drivers are well-known to all planners: increased competition and student expectations, uncertainty caused by (fill in the blank: Brexit, OfS, fees review, boycotts, confused government policy, global instability), tightening income streams, HESA data futures, GDPR, USS disputes, senior staff pay, degree apprenticeships, distance learning, etc. Failure to consider any one could lead to major reputational or financial damage, so they can't be ignored, but they get layered on top of a full plate of "business-as-usual".

For anyone, feeling overwhelmed can quickly become a mental health issue. For planners, the problem is doubly challenging because one purpose of planning should be to do the deep thinking for which more operationally focused areas cannot always find time. Planners are the ones who ought to be able to see the big picture. But instead, in the current environment, planning has instead been pulled right into the morass because policy, portfolio, risk, and data all sit in our core space.

So what is a planner to do? Steve and I have both found cause in the past year to adapt our ways of working to protect or create time for strategic thinking. Here are a few of our tips.

First, be ruthless about diary management. Stephen Covey, the author of The seven habits of highly effective people, takes the line that time management is really self-management. We all have 168 hours in a week; what matters is how we prioritise things to make them worthwhile.

Block out time, ideally full days, when you cannot be disturbed during the working week (rather than relying forever on evenings and weekends, which isn't sustainable). A benefit of working in an institution of higher learning is that, if working from home doesn't work for you, as it doesn't for me, there is usually a selection of pleasant study spaces where one can hide out away from the phone. I call these my "squirrel days" when I "squirrel myself away" to get things done.

Also be brave about saying "no" to meeting requests. Many of us could fill the entire week with meetings, but do they really all need us there? Delegate meetings as much as you can - it can be a real opportunity for more junior people in your team - or input directly to the chair on the one or two items from the agenda that matter to you.

Second, use your time purposefully. During one of my "squirrel days", a young man sat down next to me in a study area at about 9am. He plugged his computer in, brought up his revision notes, and then spent 45 minutes watching snooker on his phone. Eventually he poked at the computer for about half an hour, then another extended snooker binge, then some articles and a few things relevant to his exam. Some more snooker and then it was 12 o'clock and he collected his stuff and left for lunch. I'm sure he chalked that up as 3 hours of study time.

I was wryly amused, but also wondered how much of my time I spend catching up on news, scrolling through my email wondering which one is easiest to answer, and sorting out bits of paper on my desk  in a less blatant form of procrastination. In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport blames social media for fragmenting our attention and frittering away any productivity gains our powerful technology should give us. While I think his approach (to shun all such activity) is not realistic for most of us, we do need to remember that pretty much all apps and websites are now optimised to harvest as much of our attention (their "product") as possible. They have perfected the art of the "click-bait" headline and maintain a steady stream of small rewards to keep you hooked.

So what is the answer? Turn off notifications. Put your phone deep in a bag or drawer.  Log out of Outlook for several hours at a time. And then schedule the time you've freed up through diary management to complete particular activities. I have gone as far as dividing my to-do list into roughly the amount of time I think it will take to complete a task or move to the next step, so that I can use smaller windows instead of wasting them. Newport suggests breaking the day into half hour chunks and scheduling each chunk; even if you end up spending more time than scheduled, it means you've accounted for each moment at work - to enable you not to work all the time outside of work. 

Third, use your meetings productively. There is an entire subgenre on the internet dedicated to bashing meetings. Just last week I read an interview with an academic in the THE who said meetings were the thing he hated most. The aforementioned Cal Newport (also an academic) classifies them as lost time, requiring no mental effort.

But meetings are just a way of working with people, which is surely the whole point of being part of an organisation. Meetings are a critical way to build alliances, and alliances are key to strategic change in an organisation. For my part, when things have gone badly wrong with projects I've been working on, it's usually because I've tried to rush things through without engaging with enough people. There are multiple times when I've had a real insight or been able to solve a problem because of something someone said in a meeting. Meetings are not inherently bad.

But too often they are held as a default mechanism, and without enough preparation by the organiser or the attendees. The result is stacked diaries that mean when an urgent meeting is needed, three weeks from next Tuesday is the earliest possible time - by which point the urgency has gone or everyone has forgotten what it was for. If you have decided a meeting is important to attend, be clear what you gain from it, or the risk of not being there. If you are holding the meeting, be clear about the point at the start, summarise at the end what has been agreed, log that, and ensure your own follow-up actions are done quickly (or you'll forget their salience). This applies to a 1:1 as much as to a formal standing meeting.

Fourth, build in time for taking on new ideas and reflection. Stephen Covey of the Seven Habits calls this "sharpening the saw". This might be attending a conference, or conversations with people you respect as strategic thinkers, or reading. Have somewhere to jot things down - questions as well as ideas - and soon you will find that you are seeing connections that would previously have passed you by. This then becomes your personal bank of insight.

This incremental approach can also help with strategic thinking and problem solving. With so much change, we are all being called upon to do things we don't know how to do - from data governance to degree apprenticeships. Frame things as questions and chip away at them in the way that works for you - in discussion, with a whiteboard, with a pen, or while walking around campus. It's amazing how often ideas come in the shower! Bring in data and think hard about how to use it effectively. Trust your intuition and test ideas on your allies as you are developing them.

I am in no way a time management ninja. In 18 years of marriage, my husband has learned to double whatever estimate I make about how long things will take me and tell me to be ready well before we actually need to go. I cannot tell you the number of times I've tried to use Outlook tasks, or to use the to do list function in One Note, or even to be old school and use a notebook, and abandoned it after two or three weeks as incompatible with my thinking. But I also hate feeling like a hamster on a wheel, and, with two kids at home, I can't just let my work take over my whole life. Finding a way to recapture the time to spend on what I love about planning - the creative, strategic thinking - has been important to my own well-being over the past few months. I would love to hear from others what works for them.

Olivia is Director of Strategic Planning at the University of Birmingham and a member of HESPA's executive committee.