Writing for life

“Working it” column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 29/10/2007

Time! You can almost hear it tick-tocking away… and the more you have to do, the quicker it seems to tick.

I’m hopeless at managing my time. Oh, I know the theory. Prioritise, just say no, structure your work, focus on the most difficult thing first, delegate… yaddy, yaddy, yadda!

I have structured, prioritised to-do-list’s coming out of my ears, and my hard-drive is crammed with time-saving, productivity-enhancing gizmos that beep and whistle at me when I should be doing things. I have a plethora of time management options spread before me. Why then, don’t I have enough time?

The trouble with time management is that it doesn’t work! Time just won’t be managed. It keeps ticking along regardless. No matter what we do there remain only sixty minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week. It doesn’t matter which way you try to slice it, time is at once finite and infinite. It steadfastly refuses to be managed.

You can’t exert any influence or control over time, you can’t give it performance targets, you can’t set it deadlines, you can’t give it an end of year review… you can’t manage it! Time management is dead – or rather it isn’t dead , because it never really was.

What we’re really talking about, of course, when we talk about time management, isn’t managing time at all… it’s managing attention – our attention. That’s what all the lists, techniques, books, gizmos and gurus are all about – showing us how to pay focused attention to the things we need to do, when we need to do them.

The concept is simple enough – so simple, in fact, that it’s extraordinarily difficult and infuriating. Some people out there don’t need lists, tools, books or techniques – some people out there just do all this stuff naturally. Can you believe that? Their brains must be wired different. They breeze through life automatically doing the most important stuff first, jettisoning clutter, delegating effortlessly. I know these people exist because I’m married to one of them – and it drives me nuts.

If you come across one of them, study them. It’s beautiful to watch efficiency at work – until of course you compare and contrast your own feeble organisational skills. By now your to-do-list has grown to the length of a trashy chick-lit novel – and that’s just the priority A “must do today” stuff.

If things get much worse I think the only answer is going to be To-Do-List bankruptcy. I’ll throw the whole thing away and start again. My rationale is straightforward: if things are important enough people will probably start shouting at me and I’ll put the tasks back on my new to do list. If nobody shouts then it probably didn’t need doing anyway and I can safely forget about it.

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