Time Management Training: Why Most Courses Miss the Mark (And What Actually Works)

The bloke next to me on the 7:15am from Central to Parramatta last Thursday was frantically scrolling through his phone, muttering about "optimising his day" whilst simultaneously spilling coffee on his laptop bag and missing three station announcements.

Peak productivity culture, right there.

After fifteen years of running time management workshops across Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, I've seen enough corporate warriors clutching their productivity apps like rosary beads to know that we've got this whole thing backwards. The billion-dollar time management industry has convinced us that the solution to our scattered, overwhelmed lives is more systems, more apps, more colour-coded calendars that would make a kindergarten teacher weep with envy. But here's what nobody wants to admit: most time management training is solving the wrong bloody problem.

Let me be controversial for a moment. I think the Pomodoro Technique is overrated bollocks for most people.

There, I said it. Francesco Cirillo's tomato-timer method has spawned a thousand apps and made productivity gurus rich, but in practice? It turns grown adults into anxious clock-watchers who panic when their "deep work session" gets interrupted by, oh I don't know, actual work. I've watched finance directors abandon spreadsheets mid-calculation because their tomato timer went off, and marketing managers stress about bathroom breaks during their sacred 25-minute blocks.

The real issue isn't that we don't know how to manage time. It's that we've forgotten how to make decisions.

Harsh truth: every time management problem is actually a decision-making problem in disguise.

Think about it. When someone rocks up to my time management workshops complaining they're always behind, the issue isn't that they need a better calendar system. It's that they can't decide what's actually important. They're treating every email like a fire alarm, every meeting request like a royal summons, and every task like it carries the same weight as a mortgage payment.

I had a client last year – marketing director at a mid-sized logistics company in Melbourne – who showed me her task list. Forty-seven items. Everything from "review Q3 budget" to "water office plants" sitting side by side with equal billing. When I asked her to rank them by importance, she looked at me like I'd suggested she pick her favourite child.

"But they're all important," she protested.

No, they're not.

This is where traditional time management training goes off the rails. It assumes people already know what matters and just need better ways to organise it. But if you can't distinguish between watering plants and reviewing budgets, no amount of Gantt charts or bullet journaling is going to save you. You need decision-making training disguised as time management.

Here's my controversial opinion number two: multitasking isn't always evil.

The productivity police have spent years telling us multitasking is the devil, that we must focus on one thing at a time like monks in meditation. But I've worked with plenty of successful people who thrive on controlled chaos. The trick isn't eliminating multitasking – it's being intentional about it. Some tasks genuinely benefit from being paired together. Listening to industry podcasts while commuting? Brilliant. Responding to emails while in a boring vendor presentation? Sometimes necessary. The problem comes when people multitask unconsciously, like scrolling social media during strategy meetings or checking messages while trying to write reports.

Real time management starts with energy management.

I learned this the hard way about eight years ago when I was running myself into the ground, trying to cram more productivity techniques into an already broken system. I was using every app, following every guru, and still felt like I was drowning. Then I started tracking not just what I did, but how I felt doing it. Revolutionary stuff, right? Turns out I'm useless for analytical work after 3pm but brilliant at creative tasks when everyone else is having their afternoon coffee crash. Communication strategies that worked in the morning failed spectacularly in the afternoon because my energy levels were shot.

Your peak performance window isn't the same as your colleague's.

This is why generic time management advice fails so spectacularly. The early bird catches the worm brigade assumes everyone's brain works the same way. But I've met brilliant night owls who produce their best work at 10pm, and morning people who couldn't make a decent decision after lunch if their career depended on it.

The most effective time management training I've ever delivered started with a simple question: "When do you feel most capable?" Not when do you work, or when are you supposed to be productive, but when do you actually feel like you could take on the world? For some people, it's 6am with a coffee and complete silence. For others, it's midnight with music playing and the family asleep. Neither is wrong, but both need completely different systems.

Let's talk about meetings for a hot minute.

Meetings are the black hole of time management, and most training courses treat them like an unavoidable natural disaster. "Learn to survive meetings" is basically the message. But what if we actually got good at them? What if we treated meetings like a skill worth developing rather than a necessary evil to endure? I've seen teams transform their productivity not by having fewer meetings, but by having better ones. Meeting management techniques that actually work don't focus on keeping meetings short – they focus on making meetings effective.

A great 90-minute meeting beats three terrible 30-minute ones.

The obsession with meeting length misses the point entirely. I'd rather spend two hours in a room with the right people solving the right problem than twenty minutes in a update meeting that could have been an email. But somehow we've decided that shorter automatically equals better, which is like saying a haiku is automatically better than a novel.

Here's what actually works in time management training: teaching people to be ruthlessly honest about their own patterns. Not ideal patterns, not aspirational patterns, but actual patterns. Most people know they work better in the morning but schedule their hardest tasks for the afternoon because that's when they have "time." They know they need breaks but feel guilty taking them. They know certain meetings are pointless but attend anyway because saying no feels risky.

The best time management system is the one you'll actually use.

This might sound obvious, but it's constantly ignored in favour of theoretical perfection. I've watched people abandon brilliant systems because they required three apps, two notebooks, and a philosophy degree to maintain. Meanwhile, the most productive person in their office was using a napkin and a smartphone reminder. Elegance matters. Simplicity matters. But mostly, consistency matters.

Stop looking for the perfect system.

There isn't one. There's only the system that works for you, right now, with your current energy levels, responsibilities, and attention span. And that system will need to change as your life changes, which means flexibility matters more than optimisation.

The productivity industry has sold us the myth that successful people have cracked some secret code of time management. They haven't. They've just figured out how to make better decisions faster, and they've built systems that support those decisions rather than complicating them. They say no to good opportunities so they can say yes to great ones. They delegate not because they're lazy, but because they understand leverage. They schedule recovery time not as a luxury, but as a necessity.

Time management isn't about controlling time – it's about controlling choices.

Every minute you spend doing something you shouldn't be doing is a minute you can't spend doing something you should. Every yes to a mediocre opportunity is a no to a brilliant one. Every hour spent in a pointless meeting is an hour not spent on work that actually matters. The calendar doesn't care about your intentions, and neither does your inbox.

Start with values, not schedules.

If you don't know what you're trying to achieve, no amount of time blocking will help you get there. Most people approach time management backwards – they try to optimise their schedule without first clarifying their priorities. It's like trying to pack a suitcase without knowing where you're going. You'll definitely fit more stuff in, but none of it will be useful when you arrive.

The truth about time management? It's not really about time at all. It's about attention, energy, and the courage to disappoint people who want you to prioritise their urgent over your important.

And sometimes, that person is you.