How a Prussian Card Cheat Taught Me Time Management
Juggling many projects at the same time challenges your time management skills, so I have tried many different methods. But I have finally come to the conclusion that the most effective way that I have ever tried is the method I call bank robber time, though some call it the Lamm Method, in honor of its creator.
Herman Lamm was not exactly a management consultant. He began his career in the Prussian Army where he learned discipline and an approach that was then a novel idea, planning everything and, more important, having a time budget for every step, too.
But even then Lamm was breaking bad and was ejected from the Prussian Army for cheating at cards, so he emigrated to the USA and pivoted to a new career, robbing banks.
At that time bank robbers would just walk into a random bank and hope for the best. Lamm brought the entire playbook of the Prussian Army to this new problem and practically invented the modern bank robbery. He was the first to “case” the candidate banks before the robbery to check out the layout, security and practices. He introduced the idea of giving each gang member a specific role and he would prepare the “wheel man” by taping a map of the escape route to the dashboard of the car. He schooled many other robbers, including John Dillinger.
But most of all he introduced the now commonplace idea of staying in the bank a fixed time then leaving, even if there was still money lying there. You have probably seen this “bank robber time” concept in action in heist movies, where someone is calling out how many minutes are left. This is not just a movie trope; in the 1990s Sweden’s notorious Militärligan gang used this method and earned their nickname because of their military precision, which would perhaps have impressed Lamm and his Prussian Army colleagues.
Everyone can learn from this method to improve their time management, even if they don’t plan to rob banks. When I am researching or fact checking a new talk, for example, there is a real and present danger that I might fall into a rabbit hole on Wikipedia, Google Scholar, IMDB, Spotify or even the stacks of the Stockholm Stadsbioblioteket while I am pursuing a reference. To avoid this risk I decide up front on a time budget and then I use that to decide when to stop.
Just this morning I was factchecking a story about bass players for a future talk about ethical influencing and I decided to spend just five minutes locating sources — five bank robber minutes. So then I kept looking for sources until my inner bank robber called “time” and I decided to go with the best result found so far.
In a world of distractions and unpredictability bank robber time is a great way to focus your limited time where it matters, and not get lost in random digressions. And it’s very simple to apply, too. I’d write more but I assigned five minutes bank robber time to write this post and now it’s time to head to the getaway car.
