I’ve been watching the classes of 2018 as they have been sitting their IB and IGCSE exams, and watched my own daughter as she revises and prepares. It’s quite a tough thing, to have a few weeks with exams dotted around in them - sometimes with long empty days in between, without a fixed timetable. It’s not just the exams that can be disorienting, but also the jarring lack of structure when students suddenly leave behind a school schedule with its built-in classes, activities, and time with other people. Adjusting to this is as much of a challenge as anything.
We parents can say ‘create a schedule’ and of course most students do exactly that. Perhaps, though, this raises more interesting questions about the ways we spend our time. It’s easy to appeal to time-management skills; but does this really make sense? I am not so sure; in fact I would agree with Dan Rockwell and Rory Vaden who have written there is no such thing as time management. Time can’t be managed. It simply is. Nothing you do changes time. This simple re-phrasing strikes me as a simple, profound truth - but one that is far from obvious.
It seems to me that self-management is so much more profound that time-management because it foregrounds the essential point that our choices are not just about what we do with our time, but also about what we do with our lives. As we spend our hours, so we spend our days, so we spend our decades; so we create our selves.
Though the rather self-enclosed exam period brings the topic to our attention, it applies, obviously, to us all. Approaching her 81st birthday, the great writer and poet Ursula le Guin, wrote a beautiful mediation on this notion of time: The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time... [but] I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now; it’s occupied by living. None of this is spare time... I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.
This moved me more than I can easily say; because it spoke of a way of living a life that is, to her, clearly suffused with meaning and intensity. The idea of a life so occupied by living that there is no spare time seems to me to be such a worthy goal, and so much richer than any notions of work-life balance or of ways to protect our time. There should be no such thing as spare time - as if we would just give it way because we have no use for it. It's a real contrast to the idea of a life that seems to be largely occupied in the same way as territories are occupied; that is, by hostile forces. Only then would any unoccupied territory (spare time) be celebrated and cherished. Well, I’m never against a good celebration, but wouldn't it be better to have no such time at all, but to be so clear about what we want and value that our lives would be overflowing; stuffed to bursting with great things? In what is often a short-term, bottom-line, hyperlinked, disrupted, quantifiable working life, and indeed working world, I worry we are losing this notion.
For myself, I know I have sometimes fallen into the spare time paradigm, or it’s even poorer cousin, the balance paradigm - usually when unhappy with work. Perhaps focusing on filling time with the right things would be a better approach; it emphasises the importance of making wise choices. For the class of 2018, entering College and the workplace, this is worth stressing, for sure. But I think it applies to all of us; le Guin asks the question for a retired person, but she wisely notes it is one for all:
When all the time you have is spare, is free, what do you make of it? And what’s the difference, really, between that, and the time you used to have when you were fifty, or thirty, or fifteen?
References
Le Guin, U. K., (2017) No time to spare; thinking about what matters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Neiman, S., (2017) Why Grow up? Penguin Random House
Schwartz, B (2016) The Paradox of Choice
Never thought of it that way....Though it's so true. Often we can count times we have managed ourselves... As times ticks on
ReplyDeleteVery well said, SELF management over powers TIME management.
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