Three myths of time management
Myth 1: You have enough time to do everything you want to do.
Sorry, you don’t. No one does. The hard truth is that there will never be an end to your to-do list, but there will be an end to your life. Not everything is going to fit, so pick what’s most important to you and throw the rest overboard. (Hint: what’s most important probably isn’t “replying to every email,” “never disappointing anyone, even strangers,” “getting on top of things,” or “working.”) If you need help coming to terms with this reality—and who doesn’t?—please spend some of your limited time exploring your preferred religious tradition and/or reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, who makes this point in a way that has really stuck with me.
Myth 2: All time is created equal.
For years before the pandemic, I told myself I was going to work on my book proposal between 4-6 p.m. every workday. It was a reliable blank space on my calendar that I was never sure what to do with. Emails, calls, and other external demands had usually died down by then, and any pressing work had been completed. It was the perfect space to slot in steady work on a new project, and I could still be done by 6 and get to my 7 p.m. yoga class. It was a great plan.
Except I never did it. It turned out I’d never known what to do with 4-6 p.m. because I’m tired between 4-6 p.m. Not always “take a nap” tired, but hardly ever “do the most ambitious creative work of your life” awake. So I sat down at 4 p.m. every day, planning to work on my proposal, and then suddenly I’d have spent two hours clicking around the internet and whoops how was it already 6:20 I’m gonna be late for yoga! I was surprised and frustrated every time. I felt like a failure every day. For years.
It took the entire world shutting down and me being indefinitely trapped in my apartment before I allowed myself to accept the reality of my circadian rhythms, instead of fighting against them. Now I exercise in the morning, when it feels best, instead of the evening, when I “had time.” I do most of my creative work between 10:30-2. I still don’t know what to do with 4-6 p.m., and it still frustrates me, often. But at least I’m learning how to work with the ebbs and flows of my energy, rather than naively thinking I should be able to do any activity at any time.
Myth 3: The amount of time dedicated to an activity is what matters most.
Now that you’ve decided what you want to do with the limited time before your death and started to respect the boundaries of your even more limited energy windows, you’re probably feeling, um, a little pressed for time! Your goal, according to a time management ethos, should be to maximize the time spent on your most important priorities and minimize the time spent on everything else. The “quality” of the activity should be reflected in the quantity of time you spend on it.
This mindset is what convinced me that if I was spending fewer than 15 minutes a day on Twitter, I couldn’t have a problem with Twitter. It’s also what continues to convince me that if I’m stuck in a writing loop, struggling to find the right ending or laboring over how to articulate a concept, the best thing to do is keep going, spend more time on it. Eventually I realized it didn’t matter if I was spending 30 seconds on Twitter, if those 30 seconds irrevocably changed the emotional and energetic tenor of my day. I’m still learning that writing loops are never solved by “more time writing,” but rather by walking away and doing something else. More time ≠ better outcomes. Less time ≠ less meaning. I’m still working on applying this one, but it feels more and more true every day.