Richard was an ambitious middle manager in an insurance company. He used every opportunity that came his way to impress anyone who might increase his chances of promotion. Impeccable time management was one of his many attributes. He took great pride in his timekeeping and had built up an enviable reputation for punctuality. Years previously he had attended a time management course and become entranced by the procedures and techniques it advocated.

The discovery that things were either urgent or important, but rarely both, was an astounding ‘aha’ moment for him. Similarly, the realisation that everything he did fell into one of just two categories – reactive or proactive – was, for Richard, little short of a Road to Damascus experience!

As you might expect, Richard was a keen advocate of the diary system that had been an integral part of the course he attended. He could hardly move without a prioritised To Do list prepared the day before. He guarded his discretionary time as if it were the crown jewels. Richard insisted on ‘batching’ interruptions into two consolidated 30-minute periods, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. He hung a notice on his office door so that people knew whether he was interruptible or not! Whenever someone inflicted an unscheduled interruption on him, he would leap to his feet and remain standing throughout because he had read about a piece of research that proved that this would reduce the length of the interruption.

Richard’s team meetings (he called them ‘huddles’) were also conducted at a brisk pace, with everyone standing, and with a timer on the table set to ring at the planned finishing time. If you invited him to a meeting, he would insist on being provided in advance with an objective, an agenda and a finishing time. If these were not forthcoming, he would refuse to attend (unless the meeting was with senior management when, for career advancement reasons, he’d temporarily relax his demands). Generally speaking Richard’s high standards were successful in cutting out potentially unproductive meetings.

He only accessed his emails at precisely 16:00 each day and gave himself a maximum of one hour to process them all. His paperwork was ruthlessly divided into three piles; for action, for information and for reading. Any item that didn’t fall into one of these categories was discarded. Needless to say, Richard operated a clean desk policy.

For Richard, using time effectively had become an obsession.

One day, Richard was late for an important meeting with some clients who knew him well. Knowing Richard was a stickler for punctuality, they worried that Richard might have met with an accident. They imagined him unconscious in intensive care, unable to move or send a message to them. Or perhaps he had been abducted, blindfolded and bundled into the boot of a waiting car and spirited away to some remote location? Or possibly he was suffering from amnesia and no longer knew who he was or where he was supposed to be?

With their imaginations running riot, Richard walked into the room.

‘Sorry’, he said, ‘I had a problem with my car.’

‘Oh Lord! What was the trouble?’ (They conjured up pictures of a high-speed puncture with two complete somersaults, a seized up engine, spontaneous combustion!)

‘It was nothing really, I just got into it too late.’