You are, as you may just possibly have noticed, too busy. That’s been the universal modern complaint since at least 1910, when the English journalist Mr Arnold Bennett wrote a self-help book entitled How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. (It’s a little enraging to read it in 2015, since it’s clear that Mr Bennett’s intended audience are ordinary, time-pressed professionals… with servants. Servants!) But recent years have brought an additional, painful realisation: most of the time-management methods preached by business gurus and motivational speakers – instructions, supposedly, for getting out of this mess – don’t make things better. They make matters worse.

The problem is that we’ve come to think of ourselves as being like machines, or computers. If you want more output from one of those, you either make it more efficient or run it for more hours. But neither tactic works on human brains. Become more efficient at getting your projects finished and you’ll magically attract more of them, while the passive-aggressive slowcoach on the other side of the office gets left in peace. Chain yourself to your desk until 11.00pm, meanwhile, and even if you don’t spend those hours compulsively checking Twitter like a laboratory chimpanzee, you’ll be too dazed the next morning to be of much use.

There is a better way. But it involves rethinking what “time management” means: not a mad dash to hyper-efficiency (which won’t work, and would be no fun if it did), but a savvier approach to deciding what’s worth doing to begin with, and using your limited energies wisely. You’ll never “get everything done” – there’s an infinite number of things you could do, yet the same number of hours per day as in 1910. And if you don’t decide how your hours get used, someone else will.

The first hour of the morning has been called “the rudder of the day” – how you spend it seems to set the tone for the rest. (Mr Marcel Proust took a leisurely breakfast of croissants and opium; Mr Benjamin Franklin sprang out of bed to start making plans.) Dedicate the first hour of the working day to projects that require deep focus, rather than checking email, and something remarkable happens: distractions will be less likely to carry you off once you do visit your inbox. Start scattered, in contrast, and you’ll probably stay scattered until dinner.

Mr Tom Stafford, a cognitive scientist, passes on the following sneaky email tactic: hold off sending emails until 4.30pm, and you’ll minimise the chances of anyone replying the same day. This is no mere work-avoidance strategy for the lazy. It also lets you benefit from “batching”, which refers to the fact that it’s easier to get more done when you group tasks by type, instead of switching between different kinds. The more you can nudge people into emailing you back the next morning, the easier it’ll be to pick a time in advance – 11.00am to midday, say – then plough through all your messages at once.

Some tasks are equivalent to investing money in stocks or a savings account – by spending time on them now, you’ll create more time later on. (Examples include taking time to hire the right people so you can happily leave them to do their jobs; or building an app that keeps selling once you’ve moved on to other things.) Other tasks are more like spending cash on a car that keeps breaking down: you’re just creating time-sucks for the future. (Example: taking on tedious new duties because you don’t dare say no.) Some time debts are unavoidable. But when assessing new tasks, it’s worth asking: will this pay time dividends later, or leave me footing the bill?

In the midst of a grinding working day, it’s tempting to imagine that once leisure time arrives, you’ll want to be sprawled on the sofa dozing, watching TV or staring addle-brained at the internet. You won’t, though. Research suggests that we enjoy unstructured time off much less than we think – and find work more satisfying than we expect, because it provides regular opportunities to meet goals and feel a sense of progress. So not only is it more constructive to make social plans, adopt new hobbies or sign up for classes, it’s more restorative, too. Plus you’ll be less tempted to let work seep into leisure time by checking your email.

Your friends will look at you strangely – certainly if personal experience is anything to go by – but there are few tricks quite as effective as carrying a kitchen timer wherever you go. (Self-conscious? You have permission to use the timer on your smartphone.) Set it for 90-minute work sprints, followed by 30-minute breaks: according to the performance coach Mr Tony Schwartz, that’s the optimum rest/ work balance. Or power through procrastination by setting it for five minutes; even the most intimidating or arduous tasks are bearable for that long. You may be surprised to find, once the buzzer goes off, that you don’t want to stop after all. Either that or your servant will come running.