Time Management & Technology

"In an MBA world, the person who falls behind last wins."

I love the inevitability of falling behind implied in that statement. One of the great benefits of an MBA program truly is the pressure-cooker environment. If you put a person in an environment with high costs (my student loans will come to $164,000 for two years), high pressure and more time demands than can possibly fit into one person's life, you force them to stretch and adapt, to find an inner fluidity somehow. I read about this before starting at Booth, but it's not something I ever understood beforehand. To frame this pressure-cooker a bit more, here is a partial snapshot of my week.

-9 hrs of classes
-4 study group meetings (appx 8 hrs of meeting)
-13 hrs of homework/study
-3 hrs conflict management training
-4 networking happy hours
-1 talk from visiting academics on "What Economics Tell Us About Development"
-2 meetings with professors
-2 review sessions
-3 lunch dates with 2nd yr students to learn about their summer internships
-1 professional roundtable about crowdsourcing (fascinating stuff!)
-1 networking lunch for women
-1 "ExploreMore" event to learn about Entrepreneurship internship opportunities
-1 recruiting session with my former employer, which I attended to show my support
-2 applications due for potential consulting projects over the quarter

I'm sure there was more, but memory fails. And that takes us right to my current question: does technology make us dumber?

As part of an effective time management strategy I've made several changes. The most significant is my approach to email - I read emails one time only. This might sound simple, but I used to waste significant amounts of time rereading emails. You know the drill - open the email, skim two-thirds of the way down to get to the point, then think "Oh, I don't want to deal with that now." Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Multiply this by 100 emails a day and that's a startling amount of lost time!

So I only read emails once.

Event invitations, which comprise a good half of my emails, go on my calendar if there's any chance I'd want to attend - no need to make the decision now - and then are deleted. Correspondence gets answered and then, 90% of the time, deleted. An email generating a task gets forwarded to Toodledo where it then magically appears on my task list, sorted by due date and category.

My inbox stays empty. My calendar and task list stay updated. Efficient, right?

Here's the catch - if you ask me what I'm doing this weekend, I have absolutely no idea. I wake up in the morning and look at my calendar. There are generally at least one or two instances of overlapping events; I decide which to attend, then review and sort my task list. Run through any emails that have accumulated overnight, then adjust my task list as needed. When I go to bed at night I honestly have no idea what I'll be doing the next day. I've let go of trying to store all of this information in my head, and instead I trust my process.

So here's my question: am I becoming more efficient, or is technology making me dumber? For now, I can't even imagine how it would be possible to keep track of all of these things - classes, study groups, homework, career clubs, social clubs, networking events, academic/professional presentations/roundtables, recruiting events, industry events, informal relationship-building with my classmates (building that network is one of the main three goals of most MBA students), paying my rent and electric bill and remembering to call my immediate family at least once a month - without technology.

Basic microeconomics teaches that technology expands the production possibility frontier - without technology, maybe it wouldn't even be possible to juggle all of these activities. But economics also teaches about tradeoffs. Fifteen years ago I knew the phone numbers of dozens of friends and relatives. Boyfriends aside, in this cell phone, pre-programmed contact info era, I don't think I've learned a new phone number in 10 years. Tradeoffs. So I wonder, as I let go of trying to store all of these details about my schedule, and things to do, in my head, relying instead on technology, what's the tradeoff?

I hope the increased efficiency is worth it in the end.

But as I sit here in my apartment, watching the Chicago wind gust through the trees, I'm enjoying the space and freedom that come from not being able to think about my schedule and deliverables. Instead, there's just now.