How to Spot and Deal with “Time Theft”

By Alice Alessandri and Alberto Aleo

It’s finally Friday after a grueling week. You’re heading out of the office, and all your exhaustion is about to turn into euphoria. Just as you start savoring the imminent and long-awaited weekend, you run into your boss in the hallway. He greets you with that familiar grin and casually says, “Got a minute?”. He then starts with some flattering remarks, which you find pleasant but suspicious, and sure enough, out comes the surprise: he plays an ugly trick and dumps a report on you that has to be ready for the Monday morning meeting. As you say goodbye to your weekend, frustration bubbles up inside you, but you can’t fully let it out, because your boss keeps telling you, “Come on, you’re the best person for this. It’ll take you no time. Nobody else here knows this stuff like you do.”

If you’ve ever found yourself in a similar situation, what you’ve experienced is a classic case of time theft, pulled off by a skilled thief. Sooner or later, we all end up being the victims of these “heinous” crimes, which aren’t always committed by bosses. The culprit might be anyone, or even our own bad habits. So, let’s learn to recognize and deal with anything that steals our time and shortens our lives!

Different Kinds of “Time Theft”

Let’s face it: anyone stealing our time is essentially stealing moments from our life. That’s why it feels so infuriating when you bump into someone, or something, that ends up being a time thief.

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Time is a “scarce resource”, and as it’s not renewable it’s of incalculable value and must be protected.

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So, how do we protect it? First and foremost, by becoming more aware of what or who is stealing it.

We believe there are three major types of time theft:

• Environmental time theft, which comes from hindrances or inefficiencies in your physical environment. An example in the workplace could be two collaborating teams located far apart. The time lost moving from one office to the other could easily be avoided.

• Social or cultural time theft, which are ingrained habits or ways of doing things that effectively prevent good time management. Think of all the wasted time in those cases when you hear “that’s how we’ve always done it”, even if it is clearly inefficient.

• Personal time theft. This one’s trickier as it involves individuals whose behaviors hijack our day. We’ll dive into this type in more detail shortly.

So, what do you do once you’ve identified what kind of time theft you’re dealing with? In the first two cases, the solution is simple in theory: try to change things! But in practice, changing the environment or a long-standing habit can be harder than you think.

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Our advice is to convince colleagues and managers to “invest” in change by showing them the figures, i.e., by quantifying how much would be saved through improved efficiency.

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You’ll need to try things out, make small changes, and see what happens when you remove an obstacle or modify a routine. What about thefts committed by people? That deserves a section of its own.

Profiling the Time Thief

Management literature has long identified behaviors that hinder productivity, make correct planning impossible, scramble priorities, and create endless “emergencies.” We’ve grouped these behaviors into four main characters because it’s easier (and more fun) to spot the culprits this way. 

Let’s discover these “shady” time thieves together.

• The Chatterbox: Friendly and sociable, this person needs to engage with you and be involved. They draw you into lengthy discussions and want you to really listen. If you interrupt them, they might feel offended, so this stretches your coffee breaks and makes you forget your to-do list. 
• The Manipulator: They butter you up to make you feel indispensable, and then offload tasks onto you. On other occasions, they use their authority to pressure you with veiled threats or stating which consequences would follow if we don’t act according to their priorities or schedules. Suddenly, their priorities become ours.
• The Panicker: Everything is urgent. Every task is a crisis. This person lives in a constant state of alarm and wants you to share their anxiety. They interrupt, insist on immediate responses, and won’t wait for their turn because they experience everything with a sense of danger and emergency. The only way to calm them down is to drop what you’re doing and give them your full attention.
• The Brick Wall: This person talks endlessly, never listens, and couldn’t care less about your schedule. They are so focused on themselves that they can keep talking without realising no one is listening. Oblivious to outside input, they bulldoze conversations and repeat the same requests until you cave in, probably out of exhaustion, just to make them stop.

If any of these descriptions made you chuckle, remember that in addition to encountering these characters, we’ve probably played at least one of these roles at some point! Maybe you were the Brick Wall to someone else’s needs, a crafty Manipulator, or the Panicker over a non-urgent matter. So, the real question becomes: how do we protect ourselves from time theft?

Time-Theft Prevention Strategies

The first step in coming up with an effective strategy is to analyse. Try to figure out who, or what, is stealing your time. Is it the environment? A cultural habit? Or a specific person? 

We’ve shared tips in the first paragraph for the first two situations. If it’s a person, it depends on what kind of “thief” you’re dealing with, so here’s how to handle each “character”:

• The Chatterbox becomes active only if you give them an opening. To neutralise them, show that you’re not open to conversation: don’t sit down, turn your body toward the exit, and avoid eye contact. Show them you’re in a hurry, keep your answers brief, and never, ever ask open-ended questions. You don’t need to be rude, just smile and explain kindly that you’re on a tight schedule and can’t spend time together.
• The Manipulator often has hidden objectives they don’t want to reveal. Once in the open, those goals could be shaped into a deal that respects everyone’s schedule. Ask them what they want directly, and make their hidden agenda explicit. If they hint at consequences, check whether they have any real intention or power to follow through. In many cases, the ones using these tactics have less power than you think. If it’s your boss using crafty flattery, clarify your current priorities and ask whether taking on the new task will cause delays or inefficiencies.
• The Panicker is often gullible and is alarmed by unverified info, which they even exaggerate themselves. Our advice is to stay calm and fact-check together in order to understand whether the emergency is real or simply fake news. They tend to focus on negative aspects, and their vivid imagination tends towards pessimism, so you’ll need to bring a dose of evidence-based optimism.
• If it’s true that “there’s none so deaf as those who will not hear”, the Brick Wall are the toughest time thieves to deal with as nothing affects them. Since they don’t register feedback, they won’t realise when you want to interrupt them or object. The only chance is a strong offense: cut them off before they even start their monologues or their repeated requests. Being assertive will allow you to  say no early on and, if needed, schedule another time to talk, on your terms.

You can find a summary of these tips in the chart we’ve included.

If none of this works, maybe look into buying a time capsule to hide in or a Back to the Future-style DeLorean, if you can still find one on the market. :)

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