Up: [[Experiencing Time]] Created: 2022-06-12 Updated: 2025-03-16 I’ve been a fool for time management techniques since I was nine years old. I think that’s when I got Alan Lakein’s *How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life*, a [[Favourite Books]] I still own and now intend to throw out! When I was eleven or twelve, I borrowed a book from the Ajax library so I could learn how to do a non-Pittman version of shorthand and take notes faster. I remember that around the same time, my grade 6 teacher, Mrs. Solomon, brought in a little machine that projected lines of text on a screen. The machine was meant to encourage speed reading. I cranked it faster and faster, convincing myself I could make meaning from the occasional word I glimpsed before it disappeared. I needed speed if I was going to read and make notes from every book in my public library. I truly believed this was a reasonable and achievable goal. There were so many years when I read every productivity, time management and planning book going. I read and applied the ideas indiscriminately. Stephen Covey’s jar of big rocks was one of my favourites. I retold the story in my own books, showed the YouTube video to audiences of teachers. It was only after finishing reading Oliver Burkeman’s excellent book, *Four Thousand Weeks* that I learned the story contains a huge error I never once saw. Namely that there are way more big rocks in all of our lives than ever get close to fitting in the damn jar! I denied this reality for decades, firmly convinced that it was possible to do everything I put my mind to if only I was smart and efficient about it all. > [!Orbit] I had no understanding of [[Oliver Burkeman]]’s sage comment that, > The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things. Decade upon decade I lived my life timed, as my father said, not by a calendar but by a stopwatch. I have a bin full of print journals that I am, glacially slowly, transcribing into my vault. I’m both dismayed and relieved to see that there are big chunks of every journal that I don’t need to bother with because they are lists and plans, echoes of my attempts to control the uncontrollable future. So many of the wonderful l things in my life had nothing to do with my iron grip, but I nevertheless spent most of my time trying to bend the universe to my will. In the years since I retired and started working with Helen, my plans have changed. Oh, I still make plans, plenty of them! But my plans are much simpler. I’m trying more and more to live a Hestian life, which I see as a life of mindfulness and tranquility. Burkeman is contradictory when it comes to this. In one instance he says that concentrating too much on being present in the moment may result in the experience of that moment being lost. But later, when talking about old age, he says that a way to slow down time when we’re older is to really immerse in the moment. Stephen Jenkinson says the same. A key for me is to make my days as commitment-free as possible. That’s what allows me to pay attention to my inner life and to the art and writing that I claim as priorities for my attention. I’m much more aware, as Burkeman says, > [!Orbit] [[Oliver Burkeman]] in *Four Thousand Weeks* > …your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. (p. 91) And I’m more committed, or at least I want to be, to the idea that > [!Orbit] Louise De Salvo in *On Moving* > Humble tasks, when they involve acts of attention, become spiritual tasks. My task now is to live a new sense of time. Because it is very true that time feels like it flies by much faster now that I am older. I want to [[Live a Denser Life, Not a Longer One]].