I got some promotional (spam) emails today about time management. "Learn to manage your time", "Time management made easy", etc.
That's more or less what the headlines read.
From my point of view, you can't manage time, you can only manage your goals.
The question is what is essential to me, what drives me. Time runs for all of us, apart from relativistic effects, at the same speed.
That is roughly my mindset.
But the emails today made me think a bit about my "time management" today, do some research and see if I am still on track or if there are new insights and I can learn something more.
If you type "time management" into Google, an incredible 7,880,000,000 results come up. So, the topic still seems to have relevance.
If you look at the various pages, you read something like "successful time management involves managing yourself better and structuring your tasks effectively" or "this is how you become successful!"
Half of the pages sell new methods, the other the appropriate tools for it. Nothing against the tool manufacturers, they often do a good job. But there were no really new insights.
The study site on Google Scholar was also not productive.
Sorry to disappoint you, but there is nothing new. Somehow, new terms are always invented, and the whole thing is arranged a little differently. But ultimately, it is always the same.
I did not come up with any new findings.
Perhaps your dear reader have some input on this as well and would like to write it up in the comments. Do you think time can be managed? What do you manage? What techniques do you use?
From my perspective, it's mostly about the ability to organize yourself so that you don't constantly feel like you don't have enough time.
I've tried, adapted and tested pretty much everything. Be it Pomodoro or something similar.
Instead of managing time, we should think more about what we want to do with the time we have.
The time in the job is mostly fixed and here we are often not free. But in our own time we can decide what, how and when we want to do something.
So the goal must be to get as much of our own time as possible and to use it wisely.
And the most important question of all: with whom do we want to spend it. With ourselves alone, with family or friends.
We should ban toxic people from our lives.
Are you interested in "time management"? Probably, otherwise you wouldn't have read this. What is your opinion?
And now it's your turn.
Have a nice time.
Top comments (2)
I think of time management as the ability to determine somewhat correctly the amount of time it will take to do something or get somewhere. It is hard to learn this if you don’t have an instinctual internal time clock but it can be learned. For example, I have seen those who have trouble with this usually do not include the time it takes to walk to your car, get in, park and walk to the building, wait for the elevator , find the right office. Etc. when I was a COBOL programmer, it took very little time to write the Code but then I had to run the job and wait until the next day to see if it worked. Maybe this has helped me see the bigger picture of those other things that have to happen around the task we are focused on. And often we don’t have control over them which makes it even harder to manage your time
thanks for the feedback. i see your point.