Community News - My Personal Plight with Time Management… And Mortality
I am writing this to convince myself not to strive so hard to maximize my time.
I usually write the Community News section of the Blachford Brief by soliciting information and lessons from CPAs and then distilling them for the benefit of our tax and accounting community. But I’m commandeering this edition because I suspect many of the high achievers who read this column are on a similar journey as myself.
My problem is that I struggle hopelessly to decline requests and opportunities outside of my priorities. I worry that saying ‘no’ will sabotage my quest for personal and career success. Heck, I can’t even stop initiating projects and activities that I think might propel me generally forward, even if they are not perfectly aligned with my priorities.
Until now, my solution has been to work harder, focus more, and be more efficient so that I can complete all the tasks I deem important. I have a career mission statement and core values. I set goals each year, month, and week. I time block and use an electronic to-do list with four levels of priorities. I’m at my desk each weekday by 5:45am and have a detailed morning routine. If I were in Top Gun, my call sign would be “Inbox Zero”.
My drive for efficiency extends beyond my workday. I use systems and procedures to prepare my 7-year-old’s lunches, run the monthly movie nights at her school, and race through the weekly Costco run. In September, I stopped watching TV on weeknights and, on January 1st, I deleted Google, email, YouTube, podcasts, and Audible from my no-longer-very-smart phone.
I love these strategies and credit them with getting me positive results for my clients and doing a bunch of cool stuff with my family. But is it all worth it if my last thoughts before sleep are of the things I didn’t get done? And what’s there to be proud of if I see friends and colleagues achieving success while living with a seemingly greater sense of peace and confidence?
More distressing, what cost is all this striving having on my daughter? It’s as hard for me to turn down opportunities for her as it is for myself. So she’s becoming overscheduled. It makes me sick to think how often I rush her so we can get to the next activity, most heartbreakingly when she’s playing quietly with her stuffies.
Piano on Tuesdays, gymnastics on Thursdays and Sundays, and dance on Saturdays. On Mondays and Wednesdays, I take her skiing at Camp Fortune. Our goals are to be on the lift within an hour after she gets out of school and to complete 8 runs before we rush home for bed. Thank goodness I can’t control the speed of the chairlift.
She now asks me to give her a list of all the things we’re going to do on the weekend, so she knows what’s coming.
Recently, I decided that something had to give. So, I binge-read the self-help books Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke, and Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. The latter made me think the author had read my thoughts.
Burkeman used to write a column on productivity hacks before realizing they were ultimately futile. He titled his book Four Thousand Weeks because that’s how long an average person lives. He argues that part of the reason we take on so much is because we’re trying to control the future.
This rings true when I think about how I’ve accepted files outside my niche because I was worried that, if I say ‘no’, the referral source might not send me their more suitable files in the future. Or how part of the reason I have my daughter in so many activities is that I secretly hope they make her more confident in her adolescence than I was. When I think rationally, even I can acknowledge I can’t control these future outcomes.
At its core, Burkeman’s book argues is that what we’re really trying to control is our own mortality. Again, this element of the book connected with me viscerally. So much so that I felt light-headed in the bookstore when I was skimming it for the first time.
As a child – and even still – my siblings and I were prohibited from asking my dad his age. He came by this honestly. We celebrated my late grandmother’s 90th birthday by pretending we thought she was turning 80.
While I don’t hide my age, I also don’t enjoy thinking about how time is passing by without me doing all the things I want. So, instead of making hard choices between priorities that all seem important, I just convince myself I can do them all.
Burkeman urges us to embrace our finitude. Instead of overly “instrumentalizing” our time – i.e. using it for future gains – we should recognize the inherent value in the present. The fact that our time is limited is what gives meaning to the things we choose to do with it.
Burkeman, McKeown, and Lembke, all make other, less theoretical recommendations, which are helping me be slightly more discerning about the commitments I’m taking on. But it’s the mind-set shift proposed in Four Thousand Weeks that I’ve found the most valuable because it has helped alleviate some of the guilt and anxiety that comes from looking at my to-do list at the end of the day and realizing it’s no shorter than when I started.
So, rather than summarizing the authors’ practical recommendations, I’ll leave you with three take-aways that bring me comfort and apply to us all:
1. None of us are getting everything done on our to-do lists.
2. No amount of effort or planning can totally insulate us or our loved ones from future adversity.
3. There’s no right way for us to spend our time, but we do have the gift of choosing what to do with it.
Thanks for reading. Writing this has inspired me to do a bit better. By that, I mean relax.