There’s never enough time. There never will be enough time. Especially for creatives who are constantly juggling a variety of projects, each of which demands a different amount of energy and commitment, in addition to the everyday responsibilities and priorities of being a productive human being in the 21st century, time management is a doomed battle.
In an article on Quartz, writer and psychologist Tony Crabbe describes how our modern obsession with time management grew out of the Industrial Revolution, when factories needed to coordinate hundreds of people’s shifts in synchronicity. That tidal shift from the concept of task management to time management is responsible for what has today become a monumental issue: We are all way too busy, scrambling to get way too much done, in an ultimately futile effort to clear our inboxes and complete our to-do lists often to the detriment of deeper, more meaningful output:
[W]hen we complete more tasks, all that happens is more appear to take their place—send more emails, get more replies. In essence, if we do more as a result of better managing our time, we don’t get it all done—we just become busier…. When we scatter our attention across a thousand micro-activities, we prevent ourselves from engaging deeply or thinking properly….
Research by Microsoft, for example, suggests that 77% of UK workers feel they have had a productive day if they have emptied their inbox. It constantly horrifies me to see the number of blogs and books which focus on the goal of getting to an empty inbox or zero tasks, as if either achievement was worthwhile. No business or life was changed by an empty inbox.
Here’s a (not “the”, but “a”) solution: first, stop measuring your personal success or productivity by the number of emails that languish in your inbox. Accept the discomfort that comes from letting some messages go unanswered for longer than usual.
Next, consciously carve out time every single day (i.e., ironically, put it on your calendar) to X out of your Outlook or Gmail, turn your phone on silent and put it in your pocket or face down on your desk, and remove any visible clocks or timekeepers from the vicinity. Luxuriate in the absence of time-tracking, and just immerse yourself in the deep creative, contemplative thinking that can’t happen when you’re even subconsciously, subtly aware of how many minutes have gone by. By doing so, you’re taking back the power to manage your actual work, not your time.
We can’t change the basic unwritten code of how the modern working world operates. At least for the time being, the email inbox and other digital message repositories (project management software, IMs, texts, Twitter DMs) hold us accountable based on a temporal structure. You wouldn’t be a responsible working adult if you just decided to answer only the emails you felt like answering, whenever, based on your level of creative inspiration. But you can create a functional balance between task management and time management that’s short of the incorrectly-hallowed inbox zero. Take back your tasks, and in so doing you’ll take back your time.
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