A Personal Perspective on Time Management
Pre-pandemic I was hosting Thanksgiving for beloved friends who were about to move out of the country. Although my schedule was already packed, I decided to squeeze an exercise class in the crack between putting the turkey in the oven and starting on the mashed potatoes. I raced to the gym, scooted into the locker room, and hurriedly bent over to untie my shoes. Standing back up, I immediately felt a searing pain in my back. I could barely move. I hobbled home and ended up spending the holiday lying on the floor, my back packed with ice. As I called out instructions on how long to leave the dressing in the oven and tried to participate in the dinner conversation without moving a muscle, I thought to myself, “This is so stupid.”
I’ve had to learn the lesson not to rush repeatedly. Believe me, the universe has done it’s best to teach me the lesson. I have a comic history of physical injury when I’m rushed – I’ve fallen down stairs, off street curbs, and walked straight into various structures – door jambs, pillars, you name it. When we were first dating, and racing around was my habit, my now-husband called me “Hurricane Tonya.” Every time I take a fall I resolve to slow down, to stop over-committing, and to live my life more consciously.
But the siren song of doing more, and doing it all as quickly as possible, is still hard to resist.
Productivity, efficiency, and quick accomplishments have become a religion in our culture. We celebrate doing everything faster and faster. And for what? The few minutes you shave off various tasks by rushing – even tedious ones like waiting in line or commuting- aren’t adding to the quality of your life. And it’s not like you get to the good parts and suddenly slow down, lose all the anxiety, and enjoy meaningful moments. You’re still amped up.
We prize efficiency over depth, engagement, and enjoyment. Every moment, both mundane and meaningful, is your life. When we’re trying to make everything go faster, we’re wishing our one precious life away. We’re living, but not really living.
The secret to a sane existence, one where you can be present, notice the small details, and take the time to enjoy simple pleasures, isn’t doing everything faster, or even organizing your time better – it’s doing less.
Much like productivity, the internet will have you believe that there’s a hundred methods, products, and “hacks” necessary to getting your things organized. In truth, 95 percent of organizing is just getting rid of stuff. No matter how messy the closet is, if you get rid of most of whatever you have in there, it will be organized. The remaining five percent of getting organized might be pairing “like with like” and alphabetizing your spices, but that’s just extra. 50 t-shirts, even if they all spark joy, will never stay organized. Five t-shirts always will. Organizing your time works the same way.
In his excellent book, Four Thousand Weeks: Tine-Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkman puts in like this, “Rendering yourself more efficient — either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder—won’t generally result in the feeling of having ‘enough time,’ because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits. Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.”
There may be some people who are able to rush through the minutia of life but then really slow down and be present for the moments that are most meaningful, but I haven’t met them. People who rush tend to rush through everything, their commutes are as efficient as possible, but their time with their children or having a great meal also goes by in a blur. These are the same people who say they can’t focus long enough to read a book or make time for a vacation. If that’s really the case, then what’s all the rushing for?
Burkman writes, “There’s a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.” It arrives; you’ll never get it again—and once it’s passed, your remaining supply of moments will be one smaller than before. To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t for the fact that we all do it, all the time.”
The friends who moved away after that Thanksgiving are never moving back. The odds that we will spend another Thanksgiving together are slim at best. While I wouldn’t say that my decision to fit too much activity in too short a time “ruined” the dinner, I certainly wish I’d at least been sitting at the table. Next time, instead of asking myself if I can possibly fit in one more thing, I’ll ask myself, “Is there a way to make this easier, more enjoyable, and more meaningful? What would it be like to slow this all down – the laughing and the eating, yes, but even the cooking and cleaning?”
This is my life. I want to be here for it.