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Stop Spending Time Managing Time

I have been on a 35-year pursuit of the killer app of time management. I started with to-do lists, graduated to categorized index cards, a fully filled-out Franklin Planner, then to a series of new software apps on desktops, laptops and the palmtop. I’m not unlike a Silicon Valley executive who recently said that he manages his time best by re-entering tasks into new time-management applications.

For most of human history, time was thought of as mainly the cycles of nature—night and day, the positions of the sun and moon and stars, the changing of the seasons. The agents of the hunting, gathering and agrarian economies needed only look to the world and its weather to discern what time it was: time to get up, to track, to forage, to plow, to seed, to harvest, to sleep. They were less engaged in managing time than they were in managing their sustenance and storehouses through years that were sometimes fat and other times lean.

Inventing “Productivity”

In the late 1870s, a laborer and machinist at the Midvale Steel Works in Philadelphia noticed that the other millwrights were not using their machines properly, and were driving up labor costs in the process. Frederick Winslow Taylor produced the first efficiency study and in doing so created the practice of “scientific management,” from which we ultimately were given the concept of “productivity,” a linguistic construction of the words product and activity, or “product activity,” as it were.

Cultural critics and political activists have warned for years of the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. As we moved from taking our timing cues from the natural world around us to taking them from line bosses with stopwatches, men and women were reduced from being God-commissioned subduers and dominion-keepers of their well-provisioned world to that of being mere cogs in the gear works of so many industrial processes.

Work Without Boundaries

In today’s knowledge-worker economy, no longer are we so much in danger of being cogs in a machine; we’re now in greater danger of becoming little more than in-out switches in the light-speed movement of binary information over networks. Work has poured over the boundaries that once confirmed it. Being “at work” no longer refers to a geographic location, but is a state of mind. Work follows us wherever we go.

The common plea in recent employee satisfaction surveys is for “work-life balance.” All seem desperate to find some app, methodology, guru or new job from which they can derive the elusive nirvana of such work-life balance. In the process, too many have been led to automate too much of heart, mind and soul.

Even in Christian communities, a new type of soul-sapping Taylorism is prevalent among the iPhone and Android set. Scenes like:

“I program my computer to send me an email to remind me to pay attention to my wife.”

“My time is ‘programmed’ in very strict blocks such that I have regularly scheduled time with my family at the same time every week.”

“I rarely answer a ringing phone, unless it’s someone I expect or with whom I need to speak. I depend on Caller ID to ‘filter’ the information flow. If people want to talk to me, they’ll need to first text me so that I will first know what it is they want to discuss. Then I’ll decide if and when I will talk to them.”

“I haven’t responded to that invitation because I need to see if a better use of my time may yet present itself.”

“I get really bothered by ‘unscheduled’ visitors at my door or workspace.”

“Did you hear me? I couldn’t tell. You had your nose in your phone.”

There is a gossamer-thin line that separates our devices from being the tools of our own productivity and our becoming the tools of someone else’s productivity. We ignore this line at the risk of fullness of life, human relationships, spiritual health and gospel witness.