Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Time Management Tuesday: Where Are You?

I have been skimpy with the Time Management Tuesday posts for many months, if not longer. I've got a number of reasons I could, and will, give for this.

  1. I've been doing this for eleven years. Technically, new time management material is always turning up. After all this time, though, a lot of it is variations on a theme or contradictory. I don't feel enthusiastic about a lot of it.
  2. While I have gained a lot from what I've been studying and have favorite methods for managing my time, after all these years, I've had to accept that my life is chaos and I'm always just struggling to contain it. Given that, I feel a certain amount of discomfort writing for others about time management.
  3. My plan this year was to write more extensive time management pieces using research I've done these last ten years and try to publish them with some of the publications on the Medium platform. Then I would announce my publication news here with a link. I didn't expect to be doing that every week.

The Situation With Medium And Self-Help

If you spend much time on Medium, you learn that it is just snowed under with self-help articles, a lot of them about personal management, a lot of them about writing, a lot of them about writing specially for Medium, and a lot of them about time management. Many of these articles are written by people without any particular qualifications or expertise, much like myself. Many of these people have no qualifications to write these articles other than that they have written other articles on the subject. Again, a lot like me. Many of these articles don't have much in the way of new information to offer.  Last fall, Medium had 725,000 paying members. I'm presuming a lot of them are there to publish their work and not just read, since you can read a few articles a month there for nothing. Time management information, no matter how basic, may be new and helpful for them.

Nonetheless, I'm thinking long and hard about whether or not I want to spend valuable time writing about valuable time and pouring my output into a publishing world that is overwhelmed with similar material. My experience publishing time management material there, either on my own or with a publication, has not been at all positive. The work I've already done there disappeared. 

Look At The Numbered Items Above Again

You can see why time management material has not been showing up here regularly and won't in the immediate future. The desire to meet the Tuesday deadline was huge in the past. Now I desire something interesting and potentially useful to write about.

For instance, I saw an article on Medium a while ago about some apps to use for time management. I may try that and get back to you about it.

No comments: