Time Mismanagement
Scientific studies that deal in precision make us feel precise, and so it is with the latest study of time management.
These researchers measure at regular intervals how, on average, the average person spends their day, dividing the minutes into categories such as sleeping, eating, working.
There are always surprises in these estimates and we are invited to consider whether we are really working all that much more these days and if we are really spending as much time reading Plato in the original as we tell ourselves.
But it gives us something to hang our hats on, and as mentioned provides a pleasing sense of studious assessment, just as though we had it ourselves.
Reading such a study gives the feeling that if someone asks what the value of pi was we’d somehow be able to rattle it off to the 150th digit, or in response to a casual mention list all the members – the entire crew! – of the Periodic Table of the Elements.
These researchers are fine people and I know they put a lot of work into it, but by my count they only have an even dozen types of activities to work with. There are surely more categories than that in the world; we should explore that concept using the scientific method.
Let us begin.
In these types of things the spirit of hard science must predominate, I insist upon it in all my speculations. The scientist is just too vulnerable to personal bias otherwise, so let us say that the entire 24 hours in a day is represented by a single apple.
No, let’s say it’s a pie.
No, it’s an apple, we’ll stick with that.
Well, let’s split the difference and say that it’s an apple pie.
Are we clear on the tools that we will use?
Now, let us propose here at the beginning that this apple pie is divided into a certain number of slices, and that added back together those slices represent the entirety of a typical day’s activity, the whole shooting match.
No, let’s call it a clock, yes, that’s better. You raise a good point, or you were about to. Just like you I don’t exactly know what to do with the apple slices and syrup that would slide out onto the pie tin once we had sliced out ‘sleep’ or ‘household activities’ and all the rest.
We agree, this too is part of the scientific method, this exactness of measurement. You must start with the right tools.
So….it’s a clock, and the entire day is represented by one single hour.
Forget the apples and the pie, put those out of your mind, goodness, that’s yesterday’s news! I thought we were agreed on this, the whole day is accounted for by looking at one single hour.
Now, let’s deal out the day’s activity into that hour and see if we can square it up.
But here is where we run into our first problem. I don’t think they give us enough categories.
I can think of one example right off the bat.
I spend a certain amount of time each day, every day, and for a non-trivial length of time in that day, saying each of three things to myself in rigorous order.
The first is, ‘now where did I put that damned thing?’
The second, which follows closely upon the first one is, ‘now what was I looking for again?’
And third, after a moment’s rumination, I say, ‘Oh, yes, that’s right.’
That exchange of dialogue takes care of what you might call Acts I and II of this particular performance, introducing the action and the main characters and setting up the conflict that needs to be resolved before the curtain comes down.
Now, in a manner awfully similar to an artsy French play intent upon demonstrating the absurdity of existence, within a very abbreviated length of time the action returns to exactly the point that the audience first viewed when the curtain went up.
I say to myself, again, ‘now where did I put that damned thing?. And then I say as if I was the very Spirit of Dismal Forgetfulness, ‘wait a minute, now what was I looking for again?’ And then to further drive the point of immersive pointlessness home I say finally, ‘oh, yes, that’s right.’
Pace and rhythm are everything in theater, so let me lay out the back and forth of this sparkling internal repartee as it might play out, with stage directions:
[Puzzled] ‘Now where did I put that damned thing?’
[Even more puzzled] ‘Wait a minute, now what was I looking for again?’
[Satisfaction] ‘Oh, yes, that’s right.’
[Time passes]
[Puzzled] ‘Now where did I put that damned thing?’
[Even more puzzled]’Wait a minute, now what was I looking for again?’‘
[Satisfaction] ‘Oh, yes, that’s right.’
Well you can see how this can go on, and how it is more than suited to an audience of European philosophy majors who just can’t get enough on the bleakness of existence than to an American audience expecting the characters to break out into song and dance, but it has the benefit of being true to life, one of those slices of everyday drama that speaks to the common man.
I think it’s so important to illustrate a point from the hard sciences with a hands-on type demonstration as I’ve done above, don’t you? Because you see, this is my point, this is the exact flaw in the study that I wish to illustrate.
Though I would put the total sum amount of time I spend in this circular mental performance smack in the twenty-minute range – no, call it twenty-two minutes and twelve seconds, precision is important – I see nowhere in the study any means by which to categorize this expenditure of time. Nowhere!
It’s an imperfection in the design of the study that throws the whole thing off.
There needs in this case to be a whole new category, I don’t know if you would call it ‘Remembering’ or ‘Forgetting,’ for you would tell me I think that both are at work, or even better, ‘Repetitive Remembering’ and ‘“Repetitive Forgetting,’ which tells me that the test subjects are either putting things into the wrong category, or, and don’t think for a moment I don’t know the import of what I’m about to say, this could entirely overthrow the foundations of physics….there are more than 24 hours in a day.
Well, these are the kinds of things I think about, I place no restrictions on these deep dives into the very furthest realms of thought. At such times I feel I am on the frontier of new and ever expanding discoveries.
Likewise I see no category for making lists of things I mean to do someday, or books I mean to read, or musical instruments I mean to take up, or languages I intend to master.
It takes a certain amount of mental get-up-and-go to even face up to the enormity of things I mean to do once I get around to them, admirable you might say, but it takes time, my friends, it takes time. These are not instantaneous outcomes, they consume the one resource that cannot be retrieved, the precious seconds of life as they fly by.
And when I turn to my blank survey to dutifully enter my time spent in this valuable work, what do I see….again?
No category for Aimless List Making.
Starting to stack up, aren’t they? These categories that aren’t accounted for.
Who knows what other categories are missing, which makes me doubt the whole underlying principal of the study.
In fact, that’s exactly the type of thing I can sit and think about for hours at a time. Sometimes days.
Well, it just now occurs to me, now that time won’t get accounted for either. My goodness, this is exciting! My mind is ablaze!
Now it’s the nature of these intense thinking experiences that they give the brain quite a workout, and interested as I try to be in the humdrum, commonplace, homely to-and-fro-ing of the household, chores and whatnot, earthy things bound to this dimension not the next, I must insist that I not be disturbed while in the midst of these mental excursions.
An observer might be quick to point out that during these extraordinary cognitive episodes that I look uncommonly like a man doing absolutely nothing.
If they only knew! They are judging on appearances only, the first hazard to guard against in any experiment. It must be sad for them to lack the scientific method!
