Time Management
Can You Really Manage Time?

Can You Really Manage Time?

But let's think on a social level for a moment before we buckle down to the job of changing one single life: yours.

As a culture, could we establish a six-hour work day, a 30-hour work week, and a paid vacation for every worker (maybe not Sweden's five to eight weeks, but something)?

Could we support alternative working arrangements such as flex time and job sharing?

Could we acknowledge workaholism as a true social disorder instead of a badge of honor?

If not, are we willing to count the true price we pay as a society for health care--mental as well as physical--along with underemployment and unemployment?

Impossible, you say? In the 1950s we decided that fighting the threat of a Communist takeover was our most important priority, and we completely restructured society to do it. (An important reason President Eisenhower created the interstate highway system, for example, as a means of evacuating our cities in the event of a nuclear attack.)

In the early 1960s John F. Kennedy pledged that the U.S. would have a man on the moon within the decade, and we did it.

Check out the way social attitudes have changed toward cigarette smoking in the last 20 years. That didn't just happen. Folks worked hard to change those attitudes.

Huge changes in social awareness and values are possible. What about changes in the way we evaluate our usefulness and care for ourselves?

But for now, you need to work on the one part of society you really can change--you.

Just What Can You Do about the Time Crunch?

"YOU CAN'T CONTROL YOUR BOSS,
YOUR WORKLOAD,
YOUR WEIGHT,
YOUR BACKHAND,
YOUR WEEDS,
YOUR DOG,
YOUR LIFE," a recent Microsoft ad proclaims in thick block letters. The punchline:
"AT LEAST NOW
YOU CAN CONTROL
YOUR CURSOR"

Advertisers don't promote feelings or advocate lifestyles. They sell things by connecting with existing feelings and adapting their products and services to dominant lifestyles. The folks at Microsoft aren't saying we should feel out of control. They're assuming that we do--and offering a partial solution, an island of tranquillity in an ocean of chaos, one good product that works the way it should.

Let's examine the premise. Can you "control" your boss? (Would you want to if you could?) Is your workload totally beyond your control? You really can't do anything about your weight (diet and exercise?), your backhand (practice, practice, practice--or give up the damned game), your weeds (pull 'em--or hire somebody to do it for you--or take out the lawn and put in a nice rock garden), your dog (don't let my friend Patricia McConnell, a professional pet behaviorist, hear you say that)?

Picture the frenzied worker in another recent ad, obviously pushed to within an inch of her breaking point. "When you work late at the computer, do your contact lenses crash?" the headline probes. The solution: "They won't crash if you use Opti-Free."

I recently appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to talk about time and stress management. One of the other guests was a professional waiter. No, not the fellow who describes the special quiche of the day and keeps your water glass brimming. This patient fellow is working his way through college by standing in line as a surrogate for people willing to pay him to do it while they're off doing other, presumably more important, tasks.

"If there was a SPEED LIMIT on how fast a person could work you'd be breaking it," a breathless ad for frozen food gushes, "but there isn't so you just keep going faster…and good thing you have a QUICK MEAL."

These examples represent one dominant approach to time management. When you're too busy, buy your way out with a product or service to help get you through physically, mentally, psychologically.

But here again, we should tally the true price for such conveniences, in time and money spent shopping, in increasing dependence, in the missed pleasures of cooking and smelling and savoring (and, in many cases, chewing) food. We have to count up the toll--on our eyes and stomachs and psyches--when we push ourselves to work ever harder, ever faster, ever longer.

When you start keeping score right, sometimes you'll also start changing some of the decisions you make.