The Fallacy of Time Management

One of the fundamental and prevailing fallacies of modern productivity culture is the myth of time management.

Time exists in a realm beyond our control. Time is ever-present in the background as we go through life.

We exist within time. And because we exist within time, it’s not something we can get more of or run out of.

Time is simply the container in which we experience life.

Even if you think of time in the linear sense of hours and minutes, not all time is created equal.

Whatever unit of time you consider — minutes, hours, days, months, years — may have the same measurements, but the way you experience one unit of that time is not the same as you experience other units of that time.

Sometimes time moves faster and other times it moves more slowly. Certain events make us feel like time speeds up on us, while other events cause us to have an experience where we feels like time stopped.

Here’s an experience I create in my time workshops that you can do for yourself:

Set a timer for one minute and play soothing music or a song you really like.

Repeat this with the sound of jackhammers or sirens.

In both cases, you set a timer for the same amount of time, but your experience was likely very different.

Because we experience times differently, it’s more helpful to think about time in terms of the quality of the experience rather than the duration.

We cannot control how much we get, or how long we get to spend in the container of time, but we do have some degree of control over the experience we have in that container.