A Brief History of Time Management - Melissa Gregg.

                                                                                Image: Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1966). 

This captured my interest in what is an incidental continuation of a familiar theme in my postgraduate studies - the contingencies of space. My very first essay work explored the liminal spaces inhabited by Virginia Woolf.

Both textual and real, 22 Hyde Park Gate and 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, came to represent the sexual politics that would shape her Modernist works; her mother reigned in the domestic sphere of the lower floor; the 'heart' of the Woolf-Stephens sanctum whilst her increasingly deaf father dominated the upper quarters or cerebrum of the home; it was the melding point or juncture of the cerebrum and the reproductive zones realised in the armature (literally) of bi-fold doors - or in popular Victorian vernacular, the room dividers - that generated my intense interest and fascinations. The breaching of those defined spaces and the ensuing tensions (I argues), are so evident in Woolf’s writing.

Gregg's A Brief History of Time Management mines similar themes, especially the experiences of women in the domestic sphere prior to industrialisation. She unseats the notion of the autocratic and commandeering presence of Frederick Winslow Taylor instead providing evidence, through a feminist lens, of how women shaped organisational structures within the home. 

The Taylorist model as explained in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), created by American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor - provided a method by which to prove efficacy of employees, best evidenced in the stopwatch time study which employed the concepts of Frank Gilbreth another key figure in this burgeoning movement for people management. 

Frank, in partnership with his wife Lillian Gilbreth, developed the Bricklaying System (1909) an iconic text for workplace reform measures providing instruction for the reduction of the bricklayer's stoop through provisions of on-site scaffolding. In terms of management of their own home which meant adopting some of these same principles, Frank and Lillian also utilised the Gantt chart. Created by Henry Gantt between 1910-1915 – this allowed them the ability to organise and facilitate the time allocations, and manage the general chaos of their large family.

Ellen Richards the more radical (and problematic) “pioneer of home economics” found that suitable application of her teachings in The Art of Right Living (1904) created what she defined ‘euthenics’ of health and hygiene; a sister discipline to the practice of eugenics. She claimed that whilst; “eugenics bred the perfect individual, euthenics would supply the ideal environment.” 

Lydia Ray Balderston’s Housewifery: A Manual and Text Book of Practical Housekeeping, shared tips for her captive readership. Recommendations included designing a home and arranging furniture ‘to minimize motions and footsteps such as shortening the reach between benches and sinks in kitchens to reducing the number of arm gestures involved in making beds’. Arguably this contributed to what we would classify as a gamification of tasks where the home takes on game-design elements in a bid to improve efficacy measures.  

Lastly, Christine Frederick an original ‘mum-preneur’ or ‘boss bitch’ remains the best-known U.S. time-management expert of this period due to a series of magazine articles ultimately published as a book, The New Housekeeping (1912). Frederick forged her career by providing easily consumable synopses of scientific-management principles as the household editor for the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1912. 

The adoption of an informal breezy chit chatty tone by Frederick would influence and characterise time-management gurus for decades hence. Frederick established “the efficiency engineers” urging her acolytes (and those in their employ) to find the work fulfilling and enjoyable. These 'efficiency engineers' were a precursor to what is now the dedicated profession of home 'organisers' (out in force on the T.V. show Hoarders), their existence the very argument for minimalism over maximalism; Marie Kondo-ing our lives yet another desire for the home economy in the 21st century. 

Historically the absence of women from paid work and restriction to the domestic setting meant little room or involvement in the management theory’s scope. Persistent, "active discrimination and moral surveillance’ meant 'little intellectual contribution to productivity and organisational theories". Such evidence, as provided in this synopsis, prove the “extent to which women’s work was finding an equivalence within the productivity principles guiding task work in the public, market economy.”