How well do you “manage time”?
Productivity culture loves to pull out various tropes and myths about time — starting with the myth of time management — that tend to serve as shaming mechanisms for anyone who has ever struggled to complete a to-do list or arrive someplace on time.
These myths are so ingrained that we take them for granted as truth. But believing these myths has consequences: if you consistently struggle with “time management” you might find yourself easily overcome with shame and depleted confidence that paralyzes you from taking action at all.
Here are 5 of the biggest time myths that are damaging your relationship with time and keeping you stuck.
5 Pervasive Myths About Time
(1) We All Get the Same Amount of Time
I’m sure you’ve heard this one before. But how often have you stopped to question it?
This is clearly false.
We’ll address the daily cycle next, but let’s focus on the bigger picture first.
In the timeline of a life, we do not all have the same amount of time. Some people die young and some people live long lives.
Even if you compared yourself to someone of the same age, various factors impact our available time.
Some of those factors are a result of choices you make, such as whether to marry and have children, whether you cook your own meals, clean your house, or outsource some of your work. All of these things take up time.
Other factors are out of your control, such as a chronic illness that might limit the time you have available for work.
One of the inherent challenges of “time management” is that you don’t know the base level of the resource you’re trying to manage. If you knew you had one year left to live, you’d make different choices about how to use that time than if you believed you had 30 years left to live.
(2) We All Get the Same 24 Hours in a Day
This is a variation on the myth that “we all get the same amount of time.”
Although it is true that a day has 24 hours, it is not true that everyone gets the same 24 hours. The myth that we all get the same 24 hours implies that we have full autonomy over how to use each of those 24 hours. It therefore shames you for “choices” you make about how to use those hours.
The number of hours in a 24-hour cycle that we have available to us also depends on a number of factors that are not necessarily in our control.
To state the obvious, you are a human being who needs to sleep for some of those hours. You also need to eat.
Not everyone needs (or gets) the same amount of sleep. A person who needs to sleep for 6 hours has a very different 24 hours than a person who needs 8 or 10 hours of sleep.
A person who cooks their own food and eats slowly has less time available than someone who has food prepared for them and eats quickly.
A person who relies on public transportation to get around has less time available than someone who has the autonomy of driving themselves on their schedule.
A person who walks slowly needs more time to commute and therefore has less time available for focused work than someone who walks faster.
A person who processes information more slowly or requires more time to complete a task has less time available for other tasks.
(3) All Hours Are Created Equal
In conversations about time, the “fact” that “all hours are created equal” is often assumed, even if it’s not stated explicitly. The dangerous implication is that we can switch out an hour in one part of our day for an hour in another part of our day.
Hours are created equal only in terms of the linear measurement of units of time: an hour has 60 minutes, a minute has 60 seconds.
But from your perspective as the person living within time, hours are not so easily interchangeable.
Your attention and energy aren’t the same at all hours.
If you’re looking for time to fit in an important task, and I suggest 3 am, you’d likely say that time doesn’t work because that’s when you sleep. Even if you’re up at that hour, it doesn’t mean you have the requisite focus for the task.
Working effectively with time requires a deeper understanding of your personal rhythms and cycles so you can plan the right activities for the times that are best for you to do those activities.
(4) People Who Are Late Are “Bad at Managing Time”
This myth is complicated. Sometimes being late is an effect of ineffective planning. But lateness is often not a time issue.
Typically lateness is a function of something subconscious, such as resistance to a task or meeting, fear, perfection, self-doubt, or avoidance.
(5) Time Can Be Managed
Perhaps the most prevalent myth is the idea of “time management” itself. To manage something is to control it, to allocate it, to apportion it.
You can only manage a resource when you know how much of that resource you have and when you control that resource.
As discussed above, you don’t know how much time you’ll have. Your shorter term goals and plans — and decisions about how you use your time in any 24 hour cycle — are based on an implicit assumption of how many years of life you have remaining. You’d likely revise your plans if you learned tomorrow that you have drastically less time in your life than you previously expected.
Check In With Your Time Beliefs
Check in with your beliefs about time.
- Which of these myths do you tend to believe without questioning?
- What might be different if you rejected these beliefs?
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