Is Time Management a Myth?

Posted on November 20, 2007
Filed Under 4 Hour Work Week, lifestyle design, productivity |

I used to obsess about how much I was or wasn’t getting done in a day. I blamed most of my personal and professional problems on the one-two punch of disorganization and poor time management. Obviously organization is, in theory, a component of time management. Most of the time management books I’ve read provide a methodology heavy on organization. Since organization encompasses a number of other lifestyle components we’ll deal with it separately.

I’ve always had strange work habits. First of all, I’m typically very nocturnal and like to stay up late. Sometimes I’ll go through phases where I get up extremely early and go to bed at a reasonable hour but by nature I’m a night person. Since most of the world operates on the opposite schedule–more so in the pre-Internet era than now–this was always a problem for me educationally and professionally. I tried every trick in the book to “reset my biological clock” in order to get myself on the schedule that decent society insisted I exist on. I’ve probably gone through a phase where I obsess about my strange sleep habits every few years since I’ve been in high school. Most recently, I went through one about a year ago. I decided that my personal and professional life was suffering from the schedule I kept and so I set out to do something about it. I tried to stop drinking caffeine to make me sleep better and when that failed I tried drinking more of it to keep me awake. I tried bi-phasic sleeping, which essentially means you sleep fewer hours at night and take a nap during the day to compensate. That was what I had been doing all along but I tried to do this on a daytime schedule. I tried light therapy, vitamin supplements, sleep medication, changing my diet several times–going from eating a lot of meat, to eating no meat, to a vegan diet and several permutations thereof. I’ve maintained a fairly regular workout regimen for the past several years, but during this phase I tried several variations on that designed to get my screwed up biological clock to tick in time with the rest of the civilized world. Nothing worked–I was still a night person.

Having failed in my efforts to become an early riser I switched my focus to another component of time management: if I couldn’t sleep on a regular schedule I was going to make damn sure that I was managing my time while I was awake to achieve greatest productivity. I tried every kind of paper based and computer based organizer, along with an endless array of PDA’s and smartphones. I tried multi-tasking, organizing certain tasks and certain projects into different “blocks” each day. I tried–unsuccessfully–to implement a number of well regarded time management methodologies. David Allen’s cult-like “GTD method” was the most effective but I never was able to implement it fully.

With time management a life long albatross around my neck you can imagine how liberating it was to read Ferriss’ suggestion to “forget about” traditional concepts of time management. The point is not to be busy all of the with what he calls a “work fidget” as this sort of busyness by design is often an avoidance mechanism that keeps you from doing what is *really* important. The goal is to work effectively–doing that which brings you closer to your goals–and not efficiently–doing the most work in the least amount of time.

The profound realization that I derived from reading Ferriss’ section on time management seems so simple but made such a huge impact in how I view life and work. Most time management techniques and methodologies attempt to create a system to help you deal with the never ending “inputs” that life throws at you. The basic concept behind most time management techniques is to quickly identify, categorize and prioritize every “input”. At that point you’re supposed to “do it, delegate it, or defer it”. David Allen speaks of “closing open loops” as an important component of the GTD method and during the implementation you’ve required to go around your home and office and find every “open loop”–essentially, you’re walking around looking for more “inputs” that you’re required to deal with.

After reading this section of 4HWW the proverbial light bulb went off over my head: the trick wasn’t to find the best method to deal with all of the “inputs”–the trick was to reduce the “inputs” you have to deal with in the first place. And that’s where I’m going to start my implementation of “The 4-Hour Work Week”–by reducing my “inputs” or as Ferriss calls it “E for elimination”

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