Time management. How do I manage my time? Which system do you prescribe to? There are a billion of them to choose from, the tools are many. In the end, does it really matter?
I don’t think so. I’ve tried them all and most seem to cost me more time to manage them that it seemed to give back to me. So in an essence, to me, time management is dead. Why is it dead?
Here are my top 3 reasons:
- Time is not always on my side. In fact, in our society, I can’t think of many people who would consider time to be on anyone’s side. Once the second, the minute, the hour is gone. That’s it, no re-living it. A finite resource. The rat race, race against time. It’s a contest we can’t win. What exactly am I managing anyway?
- Even the non-urgent can become urgent. I’ve always hated those categories, urgent, non-urgent, important, not important . Truly there are some things that might fall into the not urgent category for the day, but guess what, eventually it becomes urgent. And honestly, being reactive, to deal with emergencies and fires, takes more time than it does to widdle away at the non-urgent on a daily basis.
- It’s not about managing the minutes, but multiplying the minutes, freeing the minutes and doing less with more. Many of our old systems are very linear and more focused on appointments than activities. But what is interesting to me is that we assume or infer that we personally should be the ones to get things done.
So you see, time management is dead. I declared it! What are your thoughts?