What did I learn from a time management guru? | Zoe Williams

We need sleep, rest, exercise, love and fun to remain passably human. But for many of us in lockdown, the most pressing job is to avoid conflict with our loved ones

Two years ago, I interviewed an American time-management expert named Julie Morgenstern. I embarked on it in a playful and unserious spirit, thinking I would most likely waste time discussing time with a time expert, only to ignore her advice and get back to wasting more time. Instead, she absolutely blew my mind.

A couple of things she said were so self-evident, yet so rarely acknowledged, that I still regularly preach them even now, a mini-evangelist army of one. For instance: How much time and attention do kids need to feel loved and secure? The answer is this: short bursts of five to 15 minutes of truly undivided attention delivered consistently - not big blocks of time delivered erratically." This completely changed my parenting. Overnight, I stopped hovering about, dispensing non sequiturs while checking my phone, and gave them the full beam of my gaze in much shorter units. I would say this has made me a lot less annoying, although, inevitably, it has increased the proportion of our interactions that are spent on them telling me how annoying I am.