Time management is the cure for well-being and nothing more

If productivity and efficiency were minted on a coin, they would be on one side, and time management on the other. These concepts are inextricably intertwined, and all three share several fundamental flaws: they are impossible to explain¹ and beastly difficult to teach², especially time management, which most of my acquaintances across different professional domains regard as a cure for well-being — which time management actually is.

Even though a lot of people literally jerk off on the concept of managing time, my experience working in a corporation tells me that TM doesn’t actually confer any productivity boost³, but rather bolsters the mental state of an individual. It affords a certain peace of mind when you use a calendar app to set up a meeting or to schedule a call. The tools could be anything. I, for one, mostly use pen and paper; others swear by fancy apps; another group of productivity zealots lean toward super apps with hellishly overloaded interfaces that distract more than they focus.

This might be a provisional proof of the thesis that the concept of time management is not universal and that there is no single way of teaching it, even though we are being taught how to manage time from the moment we are born⁴.

The way we are taught

From the moment we are born, our parents set a schedule for us; they decide when we should be fed and at what time we should sleep. In the nursery school, the activity adheres to a certain pattern: eat → play → sleep → repeat. Then school layers on another stratum of routine — not only sleep, play, and eat, but also attending school, extracurricular classes, sports sections, etc. At every stage, time is not managed by the child, but rather by a parent, a teacher, a sports coach — almost never by the child himself.

This breeds a peculiar kind of blindness. The individual remains oblivious to the routine somebody sets for him, which at the early stages of life is great. This is what in the professional literature is known as cognitive apprenticeship, the core principle of which is: observe how something is done, replicate it yourself, learn to do it independently. Lev Vygotsky⁵ used to argue in his work that at the early stages of life learning always happens with the help of a significant adult.

The bottom line is that time management is being taught to us throughout childhood and through the first years of college, but in the late stages of our life — the last year of University, working in the office — something important breaks⁶.

Neither a red pill nor a silver bullet in sight

After many years of learning from others how to manage time, the aptitude to actually manage time varies from person to person. Only extremely motivated people are able to manage time. Only they can juggle work, family, pet projects, tending to animals, doing charity work and sports, and still remain far from the precipice of burnout. Alas, not all the people I know are such motivated individuals.

Which brings me to the question: how, in the age of AI, in a distraction-saturated environment, can a person manage time and avoid falling into the urgency trap?

As with everything else nowadays, the answer emerges from science, and not from popular blogs. Not “just” science, but staggeringly “ancient science”⁷. From the dawn of the last century, there is an exemplar to follow, and the next note will be about this person and his time management system.

BIO