Time Management Tuesday: I'm Starting A Book Arc! Oh, And Also, We're All Going To Die.

It's been a while since I've read a time management book and blogged about the experience here, so I am quite psyched to get started with a new one. A very new one.Last week I saw author Oliver Burkeman being interviewed by Roxanne Cody about his new book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and now have my own copy.

During the interview, Burkeman said that while various time management techniques are presented to us as making it possible to reach some point at which we will have the time we're looking for, that can never happen. We will always have more to do, because we have an infinite number of obligations, professional and personal.

I have to say that, after spending, I think, nearly ten years writing here about time management for writers, that most definitely seems to be my impression. There's never an end to the things that eat away at time.  If you're a goal-driven person, you'd be wise not to make achieving some kind of time nirvana a goal, because it is not attainable. You'll go out of your mind.

Another impression I've come away with from my years of time management study is that a lot of writers on the subject have nothing new to say. They're just rewording the same thoughts, sometimes even renaming ideas that already exist. Four Thousand Weeks might actually be new and different, because it begins with the interesting premise that time management doesn't actually work.

We Don't Have Forever

In his introduction, Burkeman explains that his book is called Four Thousand Weeks, because that's the number of weeks in an eighty-year-old's life span. Usually with time management we think of time being limited because there are only seven days in a week, and, sadly, we need to spend a certain amount of that time sleeping. We don't think, Damn, there are a limited number of weeks, too.

But once Burkeman brought it up, I began to wonder if we don't all have that unspoken knowledge in the back of our minds when we try so desperately to manage our time, so we can produce and create and be dream parents or have some other really great relationships and maybe get in a little exercise and travel, too. We have to get control of our time now so we can do all these things, because there's not going to be any time to control in our future.

I will leave you with that uplifting thought. Part Two of my Four Thousand Weeks read will come next week.