Author:: Oliver Burkeman Full Title:: Why Time Management Is Ruining Our Lives Tags:#media/article Link:: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-time-management-is-ruining-our-lives
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* highlights from 2021-02-08
* But worse perils await. DeMarco points out that any increase in efficiency, in an organisation or an individual life, necessitates a trade-off: you get rid of unused expanses of time, but you also get rid of the benefits of that extra time. A visit to your family doctor provides an obvious example. The more efficiently they manage their time, the fuller their schedule will be – and the more likely it is that you will be kept sitting in the waiting room when an earlier appointment overruns. (That’s all a queue is, after all: the cost of someone else’s efficiency, being shouldered by you.) In the accident and emergency department, by contrast, remaining “inefficient” in this sense is a matter of life and death. If there is an exclusive focus on using the staff’s time as efficiently as possible, the result will be a department too busy to accommodate unpredictable arrivals, which are the whole reason it exists.
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* But it also functions as a form of psychological avoidance. The more you can convince yourself that you need never make difficult choices – because there will be enough time for everything – the less you will feel obliged to ask yourself whether the life you are choosing is the right one.
* An organisation that can accelerate but not change direction is like a car that can speed up but not steer,” DeMarco writes. “In the short run, it makes lots of progress in whatever direction it happened to be going. In the long run, it’s just another road wreck