Measuring out my Life with @Coffee Spoons

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea

The main problem with this whole time management malarkey is simply that it consumes so much of one’s precious time.

First, there is the no mean task of ploughing one’s way through the weighty and somewhat turgid sacred texts. These have a worthy if ponderous heritage in the US reaching back to Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated Autobiography, but now are largely represented by Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and David Allen’s Getting Things Done. The former is full of less than inspiring and overly personal anecdotes, quasi scientific terminology, evangelical fervour, home-spun philosophy and diagrams, oodles of diagrams. There are some quite good ideas in the book, chief of which being to categorize one’s activities by one’s various roles in life thus ensuring one is achieving a degree of balance. However, to my mind there are not nearly enough to justify the vainglorious portentousness.

I don’t want a paradigm shift, Mr. Covey; I simply want to bring some order to a frenetically busy life. I don’t seek spiritual uplift from self-improvement books; I can listen to Handel’s Messiah or read Hopkins. I could even look into the profound depths of the new crack in the Tate Modern’s floor or at the simple beauty of a ragwort and mull over the impermanence of life. As for "sharpening the saw" (a metaphor for self improvement), call me a snob, but I deeply resent being compared to a humble workshop tool. In the unlikely event that I were to follow the author’s advice and pen my very own personal mission statement, it would be never to read anything by him again.

A slightly more practical stance is taken by David Allen. His more modest approach is to get things off one’s mind by writing them all down, giving them contexts and then deciding on the appropriate ‘Next Action’. Thus, for example, if I were to happen to be in Waterstones, I would consult my @bookshop list and note that the next action was to get a refund on Getting Things Done. Of course the ‘theory’ is a bit more complex than that; the book weighs in at some 250 pages and then there are the inevitable diagrams.

Stylistically, Allen’s work is moderately less annoying than Covey’s and I have only been compelled to throw the thing across my study some dozen or so times. The main irritants are the constantly upbeat, almost frenzied tone and the incessantly macho, hard-edged similes. To get an inkling of the former, you only have to visit Mr. Allen’s website and watch the promotional videos although you should have a bottle of aspirins at hand first(put this on your @irritating-places-on-the-internet list). For the latter, merely glance through the book. The beleaguered business executive, or “knowledge worker”, is encouraged to have a “mind like water” (apparently, this is something all martial arts practitioners possess); turning to field of aviation and doubtless Top Gun style flying, he must take various perspectives on his tasks ranging from the runway to a heady 50,000 feet; segueing into the world of IT, he must purge his personal RAM of everything except the immediate task in hand (if memory serves, this computing metaphor is mixed up with a spot of Zen).

There is something to be said for Allen’s ideas although almost certainly in far fewer words than he feels compelled to use. But if you were to take him at face value and treat his methods as an all encompassing system, you would go stark staring mad. For one, human recollection is not in the least like a computer’s random access memory. As a former teacher, I am pretty confident in asserting that writing things down reinforces rather than purges one’s awareness of them. Our minds do not have reset buttons. Moreover, isn’t the recommendation that one performs regular “mind sweeps” somewhat at odds with Allen’s claim that his techniques provide “stress-free productivity”? To follow Covey’s example and lapse into personal anecdote, I spent the other evening listing down all the things I had to do for a complex software project. I eventually retired to bed a nervous wreck and spent the night tossing and turning. Was there anything I had forgotten? Were any of my items mini-projects rather than actionable tasks? Had I assigned them the right contexts? By dawn, I was very far from being a calm and composed Tae Kwon-Do expert and more the sort of spineless wimp who gets sand kicked in his face in the old Charles Atlas advertisements.

Another problem with these proselytizing systems is that their fanatical adherents write about them incessantly agonizing over how many roles they should have or boasting about the efficiency of their index card based systems. They write blogs and subscribe to chat rooms in which they debate their masters’ ideas and the minutiae of their systems with all the obsessive reverence of Koranic or Talmudic scholars. Surely they have something better to do with their time. Come to think of it, shouldn’t I be doing something more useful with my own time? Well, as a very early self-help book has it, “To everything there is a season …”.

PS: I feel something of an apostate writing this as over the last few weeks I have been enjoying using an excellent little time management program called ToDoMatrix by REXwireless Software. Designed for the ever useful BlackBerry phone, its latest version is explicitly based around the ideas of Messrs Covey and Allen. It is very useful indeed but only if the underlying concepts are taken with a degree of scepticism and a good few pinches of salt. For example, after sitting at my keyboard for an hour or so I am in dire need of a tube of Anusol. I duly note this in my errands list. The context is clear enough (@chemist), but to which of Covey’s Quadrants should I assign it? Is getting the soothing lotion ‘Important and Urgent’, ‘Urgent but not Important’? To which of my roles should I assign it? What should be the duration? This list goes on, but having decided that my need is most definitely urgent, I abandon the entry.
PPS: This piece is dedicated to a good friend of mine whose somewhat eccentric approach to time management is apparently based on speed reading the I-Ching.