About Time
How’s your time management? Do you live according to your own timetable, someone else’s or perhaps are you dictating every minute of the day like various inspirational speakers let us know we should “hustle” through our careers?
I’ve just finished reading Four Thousand Weeks - Time Management for Mortals by ex-Guardian productivity columnist Oliver Burkeman. Through it’s anti time management the book wants you to understand time so you can use it better. What is it that time does to us?
In a time poor society, we are often striving to free up time or making processes and tasks more efficient. But we would be better off by taking a hard look at our fundamental understanding of time – what it is and what it asks from us. In a combination to meet both, here is a time-saving list of the points that stood out:
Our finite lives make us chase a godlike control over time
To be human is above all to exist temporarily.
When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most out of this life, packing it full of endless bucket lists.
Research shows that impatient driving behaviour tends to slow you down.
Every new technological revolution gives us the impression that we are getting closer to the point of transcending our limits.
To the old Greeks, the noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike but to be wholeheartedly human instead.
The things that really matters cause discomfort
If applying ourselves to the things that matters, we have to face our limits and run the risk of feeling claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless and constrained by our reality.
One can waste years systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.
News and Social Media change how we are defining important matters.
We’re terrible at predicting time (unless we can count the $)
“A plan is just a thought” - Joseph Goldstein
According to Hofstadter’s Law, a task will always take longer than we think – even when we take this fact into account.
Reading is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule.
Amazon lose 1.6 billion US if the front page loads 1 second slower.
In the end, mastering time is about relationships
Almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business of politics, depends on cooperating with others and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships.