We know there is not enough time, so what can we really get done?

By Lenka Davis

I have been searching for a workable time management process, along with so many of you, for my whole working life. A lot of books are written on the subject. After many years of trying different methodologies I began to believe that maybe, just maybe, there is no good process established yet that fits my life. Then I picked up a book recommended to me, and realized this writer might have figured this out. It did help that he uses Richard Scarry’s Busytown to illustrate an ideal town that is busy but not overwhelmed. The author, a self-help writer, puts together proof after spending much of their time looking into the topic of time management.

If you are trying to use the time in your life well, do what you can because you only have four thousand weeks. Prioritizing and letting the rest be is the recommended approach. The book, Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman tries to explain in an entertaining, funny and practical way. His premise basically is that you can’t get all on your To Do List finished. Ha! It sure feels like the pressure is off, but, well what is the best approach?

A few concepts that Mr Burkeman has tried and tested are discussed in depth. Below are five I felt were particularly relevant to prove that cramming more into your day may still not be the way to finish everything on your task list.

#1

Inbox Zero

Mr. Burkeman says, “I soon discovered that when you get tremendously efficient at answering emails, all that happens is that you get much more email.”

#2

Our Limited Amount Of Time

Mr. Burkeman discusses some of the ways that Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, thinks about time. It’s existential, as expected and some argue it doesn't mean anything. Heidegger made the claim that we are time. Mr. Burkeman summarizes Heidegger’s thinking as “Our limited time isn’t just one among various things we have to cope with; rather, it’s the thing that defines us”

#3

Personal Kanban

Personal Kanban is actually the title of a book on personal time management. The authors recommend  “to fix a hard upper limit on the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time.”  Kanban is a methodology that puts all your tasks on a board and then as you work on the tasks they move across the board until they are done.

#4

Distractions

It's great to read that the author states that “Philosophers have been worrying about distraction at least since the time of the ancient Greeks, who saw it less as a matter of external interruptions and more as a question of character” It feels better to know that we have been struggling with being distracted for a long time and not just recently due to our new digital devices.

#5

It takes longer than you think

In Part II of the book, Mr. B titles the section Beyond Control and goes on to explain how we view time and how we can be “obsessed with ‘using it well’”. He also says that we are impatient and gives examples of those of us that live in Silicon Valley.

We are impatient and Silicon Valley especially is known for being so. In the section titled, Must Stop, Can’t Stop, the author tells a story about a psychotherapist in California. She made the connection that her clients, who were working in the heart of Silicon Valley, could not sit through a fifty-minute therapy session without feeling physical pain. The psychotherapist realized that these clients were exhibiting the same response as an alcoholic, the emotional avoidance, as soon as her clients would slow down then they would become anxious. 

The Sydney Opera House is an often cited example of a project taking longer than planned. Four years turned into fourteen years until it was completed, and the cost was 1,400 percent of the original cost. You might say this is physical construction and partially art, along with building something that has never been done before. Yet, this happens so often in all that we try to schedule and plan. 

Bonus

It takes a lot of patience

An example of training people to have patience, a Harvard University professor gives her students an initial lesson on the topic. The assignment is to choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum and go look at it for three hours straight. What is the purpose of this assignment? Harvard is a highly competitive environment and students are “accustomed to a life of speed”. She was trying to influence the tempo at which students work. 

Mr. Burkeman finishes the book with the three principles of patience. Some of these principles are practical such as, “develop a taste for having problems” and “embrace radical incrementalism”. One is far more philosophical, that states, “originality lies on the far side of unoriginality”. This last one is based on the concept of sticking to what you are doing, “muster up the patience to immerse” yourself through all the stages of gaining knowledge and experience so in the end you end up with something unique. Unique meaning for example an artist ends up developing a unique style only after following the same path as all the other artists, or a career taking the conventional route only and lots of time, ending up in a unique position after gaining a lot of experience.

He summarizes it all in the Appendix, and lists ten tools to make the most of our time. Number seven is ‘Seek out novelty in the mundane’ and so I took that to heart and wrote an article relevant to project management about a book on time management but in the format of a book report. Enjoy!

Interview with the author about this book.

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