] Arguably the first time management guru - the progenitor of the notion that personal productivity might be the answer to the problem of time pressure - was Frederick Winslow Taylor, an engineer hired in 1898 by the Bethlehem Steel Works, in Pennsylvania, with a mandate to improve the firm's efficiency.
] Then there's the matter of self-consciousness: virtually every time management expert's first piece of advice is to keep a detailed log of your time use, but doing so just heightens your awareness of the minutes ticking by, then lost for ever.
]The members of Take Back Your Time were calling for something more radical than merely more time off.
] One of the sneakier pitfalls of an efficiency-based attitude to time is that we start to feel pressured to use our leisure time "Productively", too - an attitude which implies that enjoying leisure for its own sake, which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure, is somehow not quite enough.
] "Maybe they used pressure from time to time, as a sort of amusing side-effect. But it was never a constant. Because you don't get creativity for free. You need people to be able to sit back, put their feet up, and think." Manual work can be speeded up, at least to a certain extent, by increasing the time pressure on workers.
] All participants were given the same time in which to complete the task - but some were told that time would probably be sufficient, while others were warned it would be tight.
] DeMarco points out that any increase in efficiency, in an organisation or an individual life, necessitates a trade-off: you get rid of unused expanses of time, but you also get rid of the benefits of that extra time.