Humanyze, an MIT spin off led by Ben Waber, who coined the term people analytics, tags employees and leaders with sensors that capture their movements, communications, and even physiological responses (e.g., stress, excitement, and boredom). Just by analyzing anonymous group-level data, the firm can help organizations identify invisible elements of work relations, such as the hidden power dynamics, in a firm.

For example, in a recent study reported in Harvard Business Review, Waber and his team set out to decode the behavioral differences between men and women in a large multinational firm and explore whether such differences could partly explain the underrepresentation of women in the senior leadership ranks (where they accounted for just 20 percent). The researchers gathered email data, meeting schedule data, and location data for hundreds of employees, across all seniority levels, over four months. Of particular relevance was the data collected with sensors some employees wore. The sensors recorded who talked with whom; where, when, and for how long people communicated with each other; and who dominated each conversation. Waber’s team expected to find behavioral differences between men and women pertaining to people’s drive and networking habits: ‘Perhaps women had fewer mentors, less face time with managers, or weren’t as proactive as men in talking to senior leadership.’ However, the results showed no significant differences between what women and men did at work: ‘Women had the same number of contacts as men, they spent as much time with senior leadership, and they allocated their time similarly to men in the same role. We couldn’t see the types of projects they were working on, but we found that men and women had indistinguishable work patterns in the amount of time they spent online, in concentrated work, and in face-to-face conversation. And in performance evaluations men and women received statistically identical scores. This held true for women at each level of seniority. Yet women weren’t advancing and men were.

People desire and thrive on jobs that give them control over their own decisions. Since the 1980s, management literature has been filled with instructions for how to delegate more and “empower employees to empower themselves.” The thinking is exactly what we’ve heard from Paolo. The more people are given control over their own projects, the more ownership they feel, and the more motivated they are to do their best work. Telling employees what to do is so old-fashioned, it leads to screams of “micromanager!” “dictator!” and “autocrat!

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed. The analysis of one’s time, moreover, is the one easily accessible and yet systematic way to analyze one’s work and to think through what really matters in it.

Effective executives start out by estimating how much discretionary time they can realistically call their own. Then they set aside continuous time in the appropriate amount. And if they find later that other matters encroach on this reserve, they scrutinize their record again and get rid of some more time demands from less than fully productive activities. They know that, as has been said before, one rarely overprunes.

And all effective executives control their time management perpetually. They not only keep a continuing log and analyze it periodically. They set themselves deadlines for the important activities, based on their judgment of their discretionary time.

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed. The analysis of one’s time, moreover, is the one easily accessible and yet systematic way to analyze one’s work and to think through what really matters in it.