The Folly of Time Management

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A second observation about time struck me one afternoon a few months back, when a fellow editor and I were facing a stack of manuscripts that needed to be edited that day. We had used up more than half our time on just one article, and we stared glumly at the remaining pile—believing, instinctively, that the best way to get through them was to plow ahead without stopping. After all, as our watches told us, we had a fixed amount of time, and a fixed amount of work to fit into that slot, so taking a break would subtract from the time available. Time is a matter of mathematics, right? But it didn’t work that way. Exhausted and stiff, we decided to take a walk along a nearby creek—and though we came back feeling slightly naughty, we also felt refreshed and clear. Much to our astonishment, we flew through the rest of the editing in an hour. The moral of the story, you might say, is that when you’re traveling the terrain of time, the shortest distance between two points may be a detour.

We might learn to see that beneath the urgency of our machinelike days—filled with to-do lists and rigid schedules with which we “manage” time—there is something else at work: a rhythm, a movement carrying us along, and we move with it, whether we realize it or not.

Utne first ran this story in our Jan/Feb 1994 issue. It was originally excerpted from Business Ethics (Jan./Feb. 1993), soon to become a publication about economic democracy. Subscriptions: $49/yr. (6 issues) fromBox 8439,Minneapolis,MN55408. Marjorie Kelly is the founder and editor of Business Ethics and the author of The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy (Berrett-Koehler, 2001).

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