Time Management Cure

by BRIAN HALL

  When we pay attention exclusively to the urgent things that come our way, we give all of these things the same weight as one another. This implies that all of these things get the same amount of headspace as one another, with no distinctions made on the grounds of their importance or irrelevance. This in no way helps us though, as there are always many things urging us into action that will not move us toward meeting our goals in the future. Many of these things not only offer little to no benefits to us but even go so far as to divert us from other much more important tasks.

  What more, this constant focus put on things in the present eliminates the formulation of long-term narratives in our minds. When we are thinking of nothing other than what is happening to us presently, we fail to see what better things we could will into being in the future. If we are only paying attention to what is going on at the present moment at all times then we never make efforts to influence our future, and when these efforts are never made, none of their benefits can ever compound, and when there are no benefits compounding over time we can expect either nothing better to happen in the future, or for things to take much worse turns than they would have otherwise.

  The Eisenhower decision matrix, named after President Eisenhower, is the greatest tool we can use for ascertaining what things we should focus on and what we can neglect. Within this matrix, there are four quadrants, divided among themselves on the basis of what kinds of things they include:

  important/urgent

  important/not urgent

  unimportant/urgent and

  unimportant/not urgent

  This first quadrant includes crises, deadlines, and problems. The second relationships, planning, and recreation. The third interruptions, meetings, and activities. Finally, the fourth includes time wasters, pleasant activities, and trivia.

  To be more specific, the first quadrant can include things like certain emails, household chores, and car repair. The second can include things like weekly and long-term planning, exercising, family time, reading books, journaling, taking classes, studying, and meditating. The third can include things like phone calls, text messages, most emails, and favors performed for others. Finally, the fourth can include things like watching TV, surfing the web mindlessly, playing video games, gambling, and Facebook.

  We should naturally go through the quadrant numerically, from the first to the fourth, in order to ascertain which tasks we should focus on first. The ones in the first quadrant have their one way of presenting themselves to us, for the most part, while we may need to remind ourselves about those in the second. Those in the third can be largely ignored, while those in the fourth should be for the most part avoided. If we use this matrix to our advantage, we can better stick to those things that will help us move forward in the short and long terms the most.

  Action plan for this chapter

  Things to keep in mind:

  Urgent tasks must be done right away

  Important task need not be done immediately

  Understanding the difference between urgent and important is a great time management tool

  Things to try out:

  Take care of urgent tasks yourself whenever possible

  Try to delegate important tasks anytime they don’t require your persona and immediate attention

  Prioritizing urgent and important tasks will help you do them when they need to be done

  Chapter Thirteen: Time Producing vs. Time Consuming

  Our time spent producing should out-measure our time spent consuming so long as we do not have a surplus of a product or are not sustaining ourselves. When we are sustaining ourselves, for the time being, we can spend our time in a bit more of a consumptive manner—but when we find ourselves in deficits or do not have any surpluses of product or income, we should focus more on our production than on our consumption.

  A good life involves a balance between the two. When we spend too much of our time producing, we become human beings rather than human doings. As Herman Melville once said in his short story Bartleby the Scrivener “on errands of life, these letters speed to death.” We here are the letters if we spend our lives exclusively for work, never taking the time to sit back and appreciate all of the things that are right before our eyes due to our constant drive toward new work to do. Life, like all things, is transient. We do not get infinite time on earth and should therefore not waste what we do get exclusively on work. Ambition can be a great thing to have that can serve to propel us toward new and greater things throughout life, but this virtue, like all others, has to exist within a golden mean: too little would be idleness, while too much would be avarice. Humans need both work and play. One cannot exist without the other.

  Too much time consuming is just as dangerous, if not more. This mode of conduct causes problems of plenty rather than those of poverty. It might be more comfortable to have the former, but these problems of the upper echelons are typically much less becoming than those of time producers. It always strikes us as less virtuous to see the issues that arrive with having too much free time, especially when these issues are juxtaposed with those of the more hardworking and perhaps less fortunate among us.

  Aside from some existentialists, we all either believe or want to believe that our lives have some sort of meaning behind them. Most would agree that it is only our voluntary acceptance of suffering and our willingness to confront it that gives us this meaning. Hedonists who would like to spend their entire lives in leisure would therefore never find any greater meaning in life through their actions because in chasing their caprices they prove that they do not want to accept this suffering. We are all living like Sisyphus whether we like it or not, perpetually rolling a boulder up a hill just to watch it fall down again and again. It is irrelevant what we do—issues are always going to present themselves. With this being said, we can either live idle lives and let the sufferings of paradise come to us when we least expect them or dredge through the inferno, laboring to establish better lives for ourselves. Most would agree that the latter mode of conduct is at once more virtuous and more useful.

  To look more in-depth at time spent producing, we should consider what it is that we are producing and whether or not it is worth the time being spent on it. Here, again, the Pareto principle should be taken into consideration: what kinds of things are producing 80% of our overall output and what kinds of things are producing the other 20%? Do these things benefit us? Do they benefit others? If we were to produce these things for the rest of our lives, would we, one day, die content with the work that we have done?

  We should only produce that which gives us a sense of satisfaction upon its completion. If we consider the product itself to be the reward of the labor spent producing it, then this sense of satisfaction will render itself. If, on the other hand, we walk away from our projects reflecting more on time spent on them in terms of what else we could have been doing, we should probably find ways to appropriate our time in the future to what these other things are that we have in mind. When we do not feel as though what we produce is worth the sum of its parts, it is a good indication that it is in fact not. Most of our waking hours in life are going to go toward work, so we should make sure that we are content with what we are making so that these countless hours are not spent in vain.

  Our time spent consuming is naturally more freely spent. This time tends to diminish with age, so some techniques should be employed to better our leisure as time goes on. We should consider what it is that truly interests us, and what we may want to learn more about—or maybe we do not wish to learn about anything at all with our downtime. Our sense experience is usually enough to occupy or minds under most circumstances anyway. This time is more up to us regarding how it is spent. This is because this is the time best spent away from obligation rather than under its sway. For this reason, it is completely up to us what we consume our time with, not only that, but we even have an obligation to ourselves to maintain the sanctity of this time when we find it. Letting the corrupting influences
of others ruin this time is a crime we commit against ourselves.

  While our time spent working may sustain us, it is our time freely spent that’s the reason we are sustaining ourselves. We simply cannot have one without the other. Without work, we are bound to lead meaningless lives, and without leisure, we will never give ourselves time to appreciate all that we have been given truly.

  Action plan for this chapter

  Things to keep in mind:

  Productive work gives life a sense of purpose

  Wasted time will destroy your productivity

  A work-leisure balance will lead you to feel fulfilled

  Things to try out:

  Take the time to reflect on your life’s purpose during down time

  Make sure that your leisure time activities are not time-consuming activities

  Don’t be afraid to schedule leisure time among throughout your weeks and months

  Chapter Fourteen: The Importance of Punctuality

  Any good time manager is in part characterized by a scrupulous regard for punctuality in all scenarios. Without this regard, any efforts that we make in the way of time management are of limited value, being hindered by our neglectfulness of the rules that we set forth for ourselves. Starting on our tasks later than expected not only damages our ability to get things done for ourselves but also frustrates and alienate those we work with. We have to value our own time as well as the time of those who we are working with.

  The proclivity toward starting late on tasks gives us less time to work on these tasks and plunges our lives into more chaos than need be. When we show up late to something, we are almost always ensuring that we will spend less time on that something overall, due to the fact that while we may not start on time, we will usually be willing to end on time, nonetheless. Compensating by staying late does not solve this issue—it only shifts the time slot further into the future temporally.

  Taking control of our own time requires us to remain punctual. Without this control, we are bound to simply fall into and adapt to the schedules of those around us. If we control our own schedules, however, those around us will fall adapt to us accordingly. Here, we should maintain our autonomy with our time. No one else should control how time is spent except the self—unless, of course, that we are obligated to work for others. We have to respect our own schedules before anyone else’s, but if we do not, we cannot expect anyone else to do so.

  The virtue of punctuality is nested within a much larger chunk of virtues—all of which are fundamentally similar. People who are punctual are typically much more likely to be truthful and fulfill their promises more frequently. When we give ourselves starting points to our tasks, we are drafting something of a contract with ourselves, and our own personal contracts are always the most important ones that we will find ourselves obligated under. This is not to say that we should conform mindlessly to all of the rules set before ourselves though, we should only make the promises that we can actually keep, and preferably the ones that benefit us as well.

  The issue with obligation should never be that we do not fulfill our own. It is more one of sources material—we can only agree to do the things that we are able and willing to do while neglecting all others that are not within our will power. The only practice worse than never doing anything is never doing anything that we made our minds up to do.

  Even if we do not value punctuality ourselves, those around us are always likely to expect it out of us. We live in an incredibly time-conscious society in which almost everyone is managing their hours strictly, so those of us who do not do this are often working with the schedules of others, rather than it being the other way around.

  While it is rarely advisable to concern ourselves with other people’s perceptions of us, we should remain cognizant of the fact that showing up late to events and projects damages our reputations, making others regard us as less dependable and trustworthy. These perceptions can often lead to ostracism in the future, as people become less and less likely to keep us around when they are never sure of when we are going to show up to things. The more we “crash the parties” so to speak, the less we are invited to them in the future. In this way, we can miss out on more and more opportunities with the course of time and lead much less interesting and fulfilling lives as a result.

  We also do our best work when we arrive punctually at it. By lofting into our obligations at whatever time we see fit we are putting ourselves in a state of careless disorder right from the starting point of work. By beginning in this state of chaos, we are setting ourselves up for failure, prohibiting ourselves from achieving the flow and the efficiency necessary for working at our highest capacity. If we show up early to our tasks instead of showing up late, we are giving ourselves a greater sense of accomplishment right off of the bat and also increasing our likelihood of finishing early.

  Being punctual also shows that we respect and value ourselves and others. Time, which is the only real commodity that any of us have, should be cherished. In wasting our own time and that of others we are showing a lack of respect and appreciation for our time in general, perhaps stemming from ignorance of its exceeding value. When we waste time, we are essentially stealing it from all parties involved, and never returning it due to our inability to do so. Once the time has been lost, there is simply no getting it back, so to waste a portion of it is irreversible.

  Punctuality also indicates a certain degree of humility, lying within our acceptance of the work that we have to do and our willingness to meet the work proactively rather than having it meeting us. This says about a person that he or she recognizes the fact that he or she is not above work and that the self is grateful for the time given it and respects that others have their own uses of their time.

  Punctuality is a necessary practice for time management, as with the absence of it, our tasks are not initiated properly and are usually pushed further back than our plans predict, causing our entire systems to adjust, if not collapse. Without punctuality, there is no true time management.

  Action plan for this chapter

  Things to keep in mind:

  Punctuality is one of the most effective time management tools available

  Being punctual is of the biggest signs of respect to others

  Punctuality can help you save far more time than any other time management technique out there

  Things to try out:

  Plan out your daily routine down to the minute in order to help you improve your punctuality

  Resolve to show up to your next meeting, class or appointment on time so you can begin to build momentum

  Make a concerted effort to incorporate punctuality into your time management repertoire

  Chapter Fifteen: Managing Social Life

  We should always give more of our time to those who we like to have around and those who make us better individuals than we give to those who we find disagreeable and make us worse people overall. Goodness in us will attract good people to us, though there are always going to be bad people let in no matter what we do. If we cannot avoid interactions with bad people, which we often cannot, then we should try to limit these interactions as much as possible and keep them as brief as we possibly can.

  It is usually our family members who we are going to spend the most time with, for better or worse. The relationships that we form with these people are likely to be the most intimate ones that we have in life, so issues among family members are typically more detrimental to us than those among others. It is, however, harder to avoid being around these people than others, and typically, those who come from more dysfunctional families have a much harder time in life overall because of it. We should never make the mistake of keeping people around who do us only harm, even if they are within the family. Sometimes, we owe it to ourselves to get out of situations with others that do not benefit us. In dysfunctional families, this process can sometimes feel like the individual is a crab trying to escape a pot of boiling hot water, but the other crabs tend to pull the
escaper back down to suffer with them. It is a situation that is not fair and does not benefit anyone.

  To speak of functional family relationships, we should usually spend more time with our parents and our children than any others. These are our most immediate contacts and are usually the relationships from which we get the most out of our investments. Since we spend so much more time with these people than with any others, our interests and obligations are usually much more tied up in what these people have in mind. We are here in a near constant negotiated dialogue with these people, one that at once helps us and holds us responsible in many ways to these other people. As far as time management is concerned, these immediate contacts should be second only to ourselves in our hierarchy of interests. These people, like many others, will usually take all that they can get out of us, so we should never make the mistake of keeping their interests above our own.

  Next, we have our friends. No matter where we know these people from, if they are our friend, then it is implied that we like them and likely benefit from them. For this reason, these people should get a good amount of our attention, and we should try to make their lives better in just proportion to what they do for us in return.

  There are always some friends, however, who have mixed effects on us. Occasionally we come across people who we appreciate on the whole, but who also serve as bad influences on us in the way of our personal development. The fact that we are able to see the value in these people, and to love and respect them in certain ways, does not necessarily imply that we should spend time with these people. These toxic friendships may be enjoyable for a certain period of time but ultimately should not get much time allotted to them in the long run, as the hours spent with people who make us worse not only take up our time overall but also make our characters worse as a result. Socrates thought that the proper duty of any person was something like the care of his or her soul, so to keep connected with these people would not be in line with his teaching.