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Why time management is ruining our lives

theguardian.com

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Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#121

Post by torpfactory »

Some thoughts on time management:

- Understanding that you will probably not accomplish everything on your to-do list was an important insight that I discovered a few years into my career. Some things will fall off the list, and that's OK. It's best to make explicit decisions in this regard: I will NOT work on that task / project because it just doesn't have the priority. You may be asked for this sort of reasoning later.

- The company always wins. If you're a salaried employee, the company will almost always demand more time than you want to provide. If you're lucky, they will be flexible, but don't expect them to value your time in any meaningful sense. Protect it for yourself in the most graceful and diplomatic way possible.

- If you are an individual contributor on a tech / engineering team: Keep in mind that you are only partially credited for being responsive to email and other requests. Your technical and intellectual contributions are often far more important than keeping your inbox at "zero".

- The best manager I knew had a very light touch with time management. He didn't keep his inbox at zero, he often said no to requests, and he didn't employ any real time management framework at all. He always kept in the forefront of his mind whatever the most important task were for the business. If his team were barraged with corporate bureaucratic junk (useless training classes, etc), he would stand in front of management and say "no, fuck that, that's useless". He was quite successful and could "get away" with this behavior, though I suspect it was this very behavior which had something to do with his success.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#122

Post by BN1978 »

JW_00000 wrote: post #106
BN1978 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your system for emails. You inspired me to do add to my Trello list: "Try ryandrake system for my inbox."

You've just added an item to your to-do list to organize your to-do list. Isn't this the exact thing the article was criticising? > "This topic of productivity induces the worst kind of procrastination, because it feels like you’re doing work, but I was producing stuff that had the express purpose of saying to people, ‘Look, come and see how to do your work, rather than doing your work!’"

The article has a right to its opinion. I don't agree with all in the article. In the real life, most of the time, the truth isn't black or white. Is improving my organization/time-management system really kind of procrastination? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Again, it depends.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#123

Post by PhilipRawson »

elihu wrote: post #94

A good book about time management is Momo, by Michael Ende. It's a children's novel about a time-saving bank that comes to town and provide a service whereby any time their customers save can be deposited in an account to be paid back later with interest. The townspeople become more hurried and efficient and remove the things from their lives that give them meaning, and pretty soon everyone is rushing around and mise…

This was made into a German film released in 1986 — you can watch it on YouTube with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q_JYYcBP2Q

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#124

Post by nunez »

Funny thing about this. I spent what probably amounted of hours of time looking for the perfect email client for my Surface, namely, one that would let me snooze my email without requiring Inbox. I also embarked on the same journey for my iPhone.

I eventually got tired of switching from client to client and went with mobile Gmail on Safari. It's much less distracting. You eventually realize that if people REALLY need you, they'll call you!

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#125

Post by edblarney »

rauljara wrote: post #16

My favorite quote from the article: > One of the sneakier pitfalls of an efficiency-based attitude to time is that we start to feel pressured to use our leisure time “productively”, too – an attitude which implies that enjoying leisure for its own sake, which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure, is somehow not quite enough.

"an attitude which implies that enjoying leisure for its own sake, "

As in - oh, 'you want to interview here'?

- 'where are your side projects'? - 'why don't you have 20 github pushes a day'? - 'what open source have you contributed to'? - 'why don't you know all the JS frameworks'?

- 'eat, sleep, code, repeat' ...

:)

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#127

Post by edem »

zpr wrote: post #32
edem wrote: post #7

Can someone summarize the point of the article who have read it?

I highly recommend reading the entire article because it's a good read and can't be adequately summarized in this way but here it is anyway: So-called productivity techniques usually end up having the opposite effect, in either the short-term, long-term or both. An obvious example is making workers work more leads to tired and frustrated workers over the long term. Or giving tight deadlines to increase throughput: ju…

Great thanks!!

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#128

Post by edem »

helloworld wrote: post #24
edem wrote: post #7

Can someone summarize the point of the article who have read it?

Time management is difficult because work generally expands to fill the available time (Parkinson's Law), and it depends on the inherent, insoluble complexity of working with other people. The author suggests that time-management schemes are a means of distracting ourselves from the briefness of our lives and the inevitability of death -- the central theme of Ernest Becker's 1973 book, "Denial of Death": https://en.m…

Thank you.

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#129

Post by [deleted] »

helloworld wrote: post #24
edem wrote: post #7

Can someone summarize the point of the article who have read it?

Time management is difficult because work generally expands to fill the available time (Parkinson's Law), and it depends on the inherent, insoluble complexity of working with other people. The author suggests that time-management schemes are a means of distracting ourselves from the briefness of our lives and the inevitability of death -- the central theme of Ernest Becker's 1973 book, "Denial of Death": https://en.m…

[deleted]

Re: Why time management is ruining our lives

#130

Post by morganic »

elihu wrote: post #94

A good book about time management is Momo, by Michael Ende. It's a children's novel about a time-saving bank that comes to town and provide a service whereby any time their customers save can be deposited in an account to be paid back later with interest. The townspeople become more hurried and efficient and remove the things from their lives that give them meaning, and pretty soon everyone is rushing around and mise…

I have this book in the back of my mind ALL the time (no pun intended).
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