Stealing Time for Your Dream in 2025 – Part 3: Work-management doesn’t work
Work-management doesn't work
Time and work (action) are, in one essential regard,opposites. Here are the laws of time-work physics:
1) Time is finite. We only live so long and, while we’realive, we’re allotted only 24 hours in every day.
2) Work—or action--is infinite. Work, whether good or bad,always generates more work, expanding to fill the time available.
Given these physical laws, it should be obvious that actionis unmanageable; that only time can be managed. Yet people regularly sabotagethemselves by trying to manage action. "First I’ll catch up with my dayjob, then I’ll take time for my dream," or, "First, I’ll get myfamily in good shape, then I’ll find time for dreams."
Don’t get me wrong. Action is what we’re trying to find timefor. Writers write. Craftsmen make tables or boats or flower arrangements.Actors and models go for auditions and interviews. Salespeople make salescalls--the more calls they make, the more sales. Dreamers take treks to exoticplaces. Shakespeare's observation, that "action is eloquence," is notonly creatively productive; it’s the best way to stay sane. Even one phone calla day in the service of your dreams, means, if you take two days off each week,200 calls per year. That’s definitely progress toward the mountaintop. Successcomes inevitably on the heels of constant action, as the ancient Greek poetHesiod pointed out in his almanac: "If you put a little upon a little,soon it will become a lot."
My mentor Tom Bergin (Sterling Professor of RomanceLanguages and Master of Timothy Dwight College at Yale) was the author offifty-nine books by the time he retired and eighty-three by the time he died.Yet he described himself as a "plodder." He just kept plodding away,in the vein of Hesiod. Tom and I exchanged hundreds of letters from the time Ileft Yale to the time he died. He taught me the relentless equation betweenconsistent, minor actions and ultimate productivity. One day, by way ofcomplaining about having no time to do any serious work because of all thetrivial errands and duties he had to attend to, he sent me a quotation fromEmerson: "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind."
Against the accelerating incoming bombardment of the thingsof contemporary life, action happens only when we steal time to make it happen.Yet schedules, to-do lists, self-revising agendas are constantly being testedand found insufficient. They work for a while, then become ineffective. Withoutrecognizing this reality, through the Mind’s Eye’s awareness, each time thishappens it may send us into a tailspin that moves us further from success. Lifedelights in creeping in to sabotage our dreams if only to make sure we’reserious about them. One of my clients, after six months of working together to changeher habits to become more productive, told me I was the "Ulysses S. Grantof time management." She told me that Grant wired Lincoln: "I plan tohammer it out on this line if it takes all summer"--and that his telegramwas read along the way before it was handed to the beleaguered President. Thejealous snoops told Lincoln, "You know, we have reports that General Grantdrinks a considerable amount of whiskey." "Is that right?"Lincoln replied. "Find out what brand he drinks and send a case of it toeach of my Generals."
The human nature of time
Archimedes: Give me a lever and I can move the world.
Atchity: Time is the Dreamer’s lever.
All you need to make your dreams come true is time. Usingtime as your most faithful collaborator begins with understanding itsinteractive characteristics and protean shapes. You’ll begin noticing that timebehaves differently under different circumstances. When you’re concentrating,your awareness of time seems to disappear because you’ve taken yourself out ofthe Accountant’s time and are dealing with the Visionary whose experience istimeless. When you're away from your quest, you become very conscious of timebecause your Visionary is clamoring in his cage to be released from theconstraints of logical time.
"You've got my full attention": compartments oftime, time and energy, rotation, kinds of time, and linkage
Time-effectiveness is a direct function of attention span.When you’re concentrating, giving the activity you’re involved with your fullattention, you produce excellent results. When your attention span wavers andfades, the results diminish. Until you recognize that attention span dictateseffectiveness, you’re likely to waste a great deal of time.
The key to avoiding this situation is assessing how longyour attention span is for each activity you engage in--and then doing yourbest to engage in that activity in appropriate compartments (allotments of timethat you’ve found to be most productive). Since my particular career ismultivalent, I pursue what I call a "rotation method” of moving amongactivities that support my producing, managing, writing, brand-launching,speaking, and managing my next quest. Ilove all these activities, but not when I do them exclusively--each one havingits own high ratio of crazy-making aspects that diminishes automatically whenthat activity is juxtaposed with the others.
Except during a crisis in one of the four areas, at whichpoint all other activities stand aside until the crisis is resolved, I find itstimulating to spend an hour working on production-related matters, thenspending the next hour on calls that manage various client projects indevelopment. I’ve also learned that it’s a waste of time to try to controlthings that only time can accomplish--such as making a phone call, then waitingnext to the phone for a response to it; or staring at the toaster waiting forthe toast to pop up. The only time you have anything approaching direct controlof anything is when the ball is in your court. During that moment I focus ongetting the ball out of my court into someone else’s court so that I’ve done whatI need to do to make the game continue. Success is all about what you do whileyou’re waiting.
Rotating from one activity to another ensures that theoutreach begun in Activity A will be "taking its time" while you’reengaged in Activities B, C, and D. When the phone rings from the A call, youinterrupt D to deal with it--and it’s generally a pleasant interruption,knowing that one facet of your career is vying with another for your attention.
An hour is probably an average attention span compartment forwork. But the length of the particular compartments (remember that"compartments" are allotments of time given to a particular workactivity) changes from time to time as your attention span for that activityevolves. During the original drafting of this book, for example, I spent twohours a day writing, whereas before I began the draft my attention span allowedme to spend only an hour or less a day thinking about the book and gathering mynotes for it.
There’s no magical formula for determining attention span;it changes as you and your circumstances change. Yet once determined, attentionspan is the mastering rod between the serpents, the compartment of time wherepast and future meet in a present that feeds from the first and nourishes thelatter.
Obviously attention span is related to your energy level atdifferent times of day, and with regard to different activities. Activitiesthat drain you should not be scheduled one after the other, but shouldalternate with activities that create energy for you.
Energy and attention span will also be different dependingon whether you’re at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of aparticular objective. Your attention span is most in danger of sabotaging youin the middle, where it’s easy to confuse your fatigue from the hard work ofplodding forward with some sort of psychological upset caused by the processyou’re engaged in. Usually that situation can be resolved by shortening theallotments of time you’re devoting to the present objective; or changing theactivities around which you’re scheduling this objective’s compartments.
When a particular compartment is nearing its end, use thelast few minutes of it (when the Accountant comes back online to remind youthat the time is "almost up") to jot down what you’re going to do thenext time you revisit this compartment. This automatically puts your Visionaryand Accountant into a percolation mode in which they bat things back and forth"in the back of your mind" while you¹re busy working in the next activity’scompartment.
Next: Where does the time go?
