You Can't Manage Time

You don’t manage time. You can’t. When you’re inattentive, it manages you.

How often do “to-do lists” produce very much actual doing? They frequently have the opposite effect, documenting our apparently weak will power and underlining our loserhood in personal productivity. The good intention goes on the list . . . and there it stays.

The paper evidence reinforces a general hopelessness that we relieve a bit by blaming it on impossible workloads, or maybe too-short days. But we know better, don’t we? It’s on us – personally.

Take it from me – I’m a poster child for fond hopes, often immortalized in writing on documents both formal and informal, typed and color-coded or just scribbled. Lists upon lists. Once, I think, I actually was able to honestly line out all the items on a day list, maybe a dozen of them. Once.

Project Management: Born Ignorant

Getting Competent Is Conscious

     It’s fun, and somewhat inspiring, to watch a baby progress from flops to the first real sequence of steps, thereby qualifying to be a toddler. It’s less fun to live in the same household with a person learning to play the violin.

     Both are learning processes. Walking may be close to a natural act for a human being, but playing the violin is not. In fact, almost everything we consciously do all day had to be learned, because we weren’t born knowing how to do it. Incompetence is our natural state.

     So we spend our entire lives learning stuff. It’s a lifelong project.