I have issues with time management. That sentence is ambiguous, so let me clarify: my issue isn’t with the management of my own time. Sure, I have plenty of flaws in that field, but I think I make it work most of the time, and am reasonably happy with my situation in that respect. I mean to say that I take issue with the field of time management; with the idea that through a combination of log keeping, filling in schedules, rigid prioritization, and large volumes of willpower, it is possible to reclaim every moment of one’s existence.
The problems with this line of thinking should be readily apparent. Humans control only a fraction of the circumstances that affect their time, even moreso on an individual scale. Traffic, weather, infrastructure failure, logistical issues, and even acts of god can throw even the best laid plans into chaos. In most cases, it is not even possible to know which factors will present a challenge. For example, even if I have an inkling that traffic will be a problem, I cannot know with certainty what the weather conditions will be. A plan that does not factor in weather risks being unraveled by a snowstorm, while a plan that does so needlessly is inefficient, and hence, redundant.
But plenty of time-management moderates acknowledge this, and so I’m willing to let it slide for the sake of argument. My problem with these people is that they tend to assume everyone has a routine, or at least, that their needs and tasks are predictable and consistent. It is also assumed, usually not even aloud, but by implication, that one’s abilities are predictable and consistent. This gets my goat, because it’s not true, certainly not in my case.
The reason I try as hard as possible to avoid schedules, and where necessary to accomplish tasks, resort to prioritized checklists rather than set times, is not a decision made for my own satisfaction, but an acknowledgement of a reality over which I have no control. The reality is that my medical condition changes on a minute to minute basis that the most advanced predictive algorithms can only make guess ranging half an hour or so into the future, and only with flawless biometric data coming in live. This is a very recent improvement over the previous status quo, whereby people with similar conditions were known from time to time to quite simply drop dead without any warning whatsoever.
I understand that this is a fairly difficult concept to internalize, so let me provide a slightly more tangible example. Suppose every fifteen minutes you exist, whatever you’re doing, whether awake or asleep, a twenty-sided die is rolled. You can see the results of this die so long at you remember to look at it, but it won’t do anything to inform you of its result. If, at any time, the result of the roll is a one, you have to, let’s say, do jumping jacks for ten minutes while singing the alphabet backwards. If at any point, you fail to do so, after ten minutes your vision will get progressively blurrier until you become legally blind. Some time after that, let’s say, thirty minutes after the initial roll, if you haven’t finished your jumping jack alphabet routine, then your heart will stop.
Now, one in twenty isn’t a lot. At any given moment, you’re more likely than not to get away with doing noting. But this happens every fifteen minutes of every day. That’s ninety six times a day. If the one in twenty holds true, odds are you’ll spend somewhere in the ballpark of fifty minutes of each day dealing with this issue. You won’t know when. You might have to wake up in the middle of the night to do jumping jacks, or make a fool of yourself in front of friends or colleagues to prevent your heart from stopping. You don’t even know with any certainty whether you’ll have to spend fifty minutes, several hours, or no time at all on a given day.
Now try to imagine what this does to a schedule. Obviously, it rules out a very tight regimen that makes use of every minute, because you need to have the time available in case you wind up doing jumping jacks for hours. But more than that, it makes even light schedules difficult to follow. Because even if you have only one thing on your agenda, if that one thing happens to be the moment you need to do jumping jacks, if that thing is something big, like an appointment with a busy person, or a flight, chances are your plans won’t work out.
This is bad enough that you’re probably going to be a bit skeptical of major time management programs. But there’s another part of the equation that’s important to consider. Because yes, there are people who have variable time commitments. New parents, for example, can’t very well pick when their children cry and need to be fed and changed. Most of these people will agree that rigid schedules under such circumstances are for the birds. But some people, a small subset of seemingly superhuman go-getters are able to make the Herculean sacrifices necessary to live according to a timetable despite such handicaps.
The missing piece here is variability in ability as well as task. Because there are plenty of things about my medical issues that won’t directly threaten my life, but will make actual productivity difficult. So going back to the earlier hypothetical, let’s suppose that in addition to having to do jumping jacks on a roll of one, on any roll below three, you get a headache for fifteen minutes.
A three gives you an annoying, albeit mostly manageable headache- a four or five on the standard 1-10 scale. Working through such pain is possible with some added concentration, but you’re a little slower on the uptake, it takes you longer to do things, and you probably won’t have any million dollar ideas. It’s definitely a handicap, but the sort of thing you can usually tough out quietly. If you roll a three while asleep, you won’t stir, but you may not feel as rested as normal.
Rolling a two is more serious- a five or even a six on the 1-10 pain scale. The kind of painkillers it takes to make the pain truly go away are the sorts of meds that don’t let you operate machinery. Keeping your focus on anything for too long is difficult, and your ability to complete anything more cognitively taxing than an online personality quiz is badly impacted. You can slog through rote work, and with great effort you can keep working on something you’re writing, provided you’ve already started it and are just following up, rather than trying to make new points, but in either case, it’s not your best work, it’ll take you far longer than usual to accomplish, and if what you’re doing is remotely important, you’ll want to check it back when you’re feeling better to make sure it’s up to snuff.
This obviously isn’t a realistic scenario. Real life medical issues don’t obey strict rules or even consistent probabilities. It’s difficult to explain that the reason I will never have control of my time is that I don’t have control of me; my needs and abilities to meet those needs change minute by minute. Well, it’s easy to explain, but difficult to appreciate.
