Time perceptions

On to-dos and the time we have

A big part of my fascination with productivity is a fascination with how we think about time. The ultimate problem, the thing we all want to know as readers of productivity advice, is how to fit everything we want to do into the time that we have.

To-do lists are helpful (write everything down), scheduling tasks on your calendar is helpful, and prioritizing is helpful. These are some of the mechanics of time management; they are essential, and I write about them, as do many other authors.

But another dimension of productivity is more mental, and also physical: how we perceive our time. In my experience how we perceive our time is very intimately related to how we actually use it.

I like time blocking to-dos on my calendar. I often block out a day, fitting around meetings and classes a one- or two-hour chunk for my current research project and a half hour for catching up on random emails. To a certain extent, it’s a good strategy, and I recommend it. Blocking out time for your various projects can ensure that you make time for all of your priorities.

But how we actually enact a time-blocked day is another thing. We may get tired or distracted, or something else urgent may come up. The truth is that we are not machines who execute productivity plans perfectly, just as our worlds often intervene in those plans, too.

How we perceive our time, as well as how we perceive our projects and to-dos, shapes our resilience to such inevitable changes of plan. Do we get derailed, frustrated, and overwhelmed, stressed that we now have only thirty minutes to finish a task that needs two hours? Or do we regroup, take things in stride, and do our best with the time we have remaining? Do we dread those thirty minutes or see them as an opportunity?

We have to recognize that time is extremely malleable. Some more rote kinds of tasks take a fairly fixed amount of time (e.g., I grade quizzes in one of my classes at a rate of one per minute), but most of the tasks we do will take the time we allot to them. Indeed, I find this to be a very peculiar phenomenon, one that indicates that we do not use time robotically but instead use it very fluidly, in a way that is connected to our fluctuating minds and bodies. We use time experientially.

What if we perceived time more as our ally (e.g., as aligned with our bodies and capabilities), than as our nemesis (e.g., focusing on not having enough time)? Might we get more done? What if we trusted in our abilities to get the most important things done, rather than stressing out and doubting ourselves? Would we be happier?

These questions—which are about our mindset, not about our productivity mechanics—are ones that I’m throwing around as I try to understand the human element of productivity. So many productivity authors stop at the mechanics. But many times in my life, I have written a perfect to-do list and perfectly time-blocked my schedule only to not actually do the work. There is much, much more to productivity than mechanics.