Why There’s No Such Thing as Time Management

1. Time is a fixed construct – we live in a world where we’ve agreed on the measure of a minute, hour, day, week and year, you can’t manage a fixed construct. You can only manage the things that are fluid and changeable around it. Why does this perspective matter? If we think of time as the enemy to our to-do list it is distracting us from what we can manage – how and where we allocate our energy and focus.
2. The sense of time is relative to what you are doing – boring = slow, fun = fast. When you feel time passes differently than actual time, time management is the prank you didn’t know about.
3. You’ll always feel mismanaged when you put tasks in a rigid time frame. Tasks don’t always take the time you think they will. Time management is held up as the saviour to feeling more in control but what happens when your planned activity goes outside the tightly scheduled spot? You’ll feel more mismanaged than if you made a plan that allowed for more flow of your natural rhythm.
4. Time is used in a linear way with time management, but your life is dynamic and is impacted by values, emotions and needs. When we’re setting out to manage time, most of us fall into a trap. We plan with the idea that our day has an even tempo. The fact is that most of us perform in fluctuating waves of mood, energy and needs. For my ADHD friends among us, we can add fluctuation in focus, hyperfocus, interest and activation. You can roughly predict some of these fluctuations, but adding them to a linear sequence tightly bound by minutes or even hours could lead to many more frustrations.

Question:

What do you think? Is there still a place for Time Management?
What perspective could you change to be able to have a better relationship with time?

Could any of these be an alternative way to look at this?:

• Life Management – bringing the wholeness of who you are and what you want your life to look like into the picture. Almost like zooming out and seeing the bigger picture.
• Possibility Management – take the view of what could be possible with the day, hour or week. Look at the possibilities in partnership with what adds to your life that works for you.
• Time Valuing – Give some context to the different time blocks in your day. Give them value and align them with your tasks and what you need.