time and energy management, timing, tools and strategies
This post is part of a series exploring how we humans interact with time. So far we’ve figured out that our latest iteration of strategies for dealing with time, Clock Time, is starting to wear down a lot of us post-moderns into frazzles. The whole purpose of Clock Time is to enable us to get more and more things done. The Achievement Junkies among us are having a field day. The rest of us are finding that if we are…
Poet John O’Donohue once beautifully said, “I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.” After about 300 years or so of living on clock time, I think we humans have gotten a pretty good idea of where that mode of moving can take us. It is not where O’Donohue would want to go. Clock time tends to turn off the wonder-noticing parts of our brain, it seems. This is not a…
I am re-reading Rachel Naomi Remen’s book, MY GRANDFATHER’S BLESSINGS: Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging. This lyrical book of the collected, very short musings and reflections by a born storyteller and wounded healer who has spent much of her life as a holistic medical counselor for people with chronic and terminal illnesses is one of my go-to books for getting myself back to clarity about how to deal with the vagaries of Life-Its-Own-Self and with our own mortality. The…
I remember when “don’t push the river; it flows by itself” was a pop-wisdom phrase on everybody’s lips. A hippie catch-phrase gone viral in the 1960s and 70s, it was likely to be used to browbeat somebody who was tense or anxious or downright scared and getting naggy behind it. Commonly, back then, the phrase usually kept company with words like “uptight” or “square” and prefaced shaming statements about being some kind of whiny stick in the mud. The river…
Elon Musk is probably right. Remote work (formerly known as “telecommuting” or “working from home”) is a challenge…for corporations and other organizational entities. It can cause massive headaches for managers and human resource people trying to round up and ride herd on all the “wild” spirits who want to do their own kind of different and were given an opportunity to try it when the world got hit by a massive pandemic that made the corporate culture standards of behavior…
We humans may be the only animals on this planet that are aware of time. In fact, humans are more than a little freaky about time. We have been fascinated and even obsessed with it for a good long while now. There’s archaeological evidence that the Babylonians and Egyptians began to measure time about 5,000 years ago. That development in human thought-constructing was probably built on a long, long line of other previously thunk thoughts and concepts. Some people say…
A really smart somebody or other once opined that time is what keeps everything in a story from happening all at once. Since we humans are all engaged in making up some kind of story or other, this is an important concept. I know. All kinds of people have weighed in with opinions – esoteric, scientific, and mundane – about Time. You have probably heard them all before. Basically, under all of that pretzel-brain making cascade, we are told that…
I am reading Andrew Santella’s book, SOON: An Overdue History of Procrastination from Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me. Again. This little book is setting off all kinds of firecracker strings in my head. Santella, like me (and maybe you too?), is a self-confessed procrastinator so he’s at least well-practiced in trying to suss out the whats, the whys, and the wherefores of that almost universally censured habit, procrastination.
For years now, I’ve heard about the “Slow Movement.” The ideals of keeping to a human pace, puzzling out and enjoying inherent creative processes, caring about human interactions and needs, and savoring life’s little moments one by one have always resonated with me. But, hey…I’ve been busy! As the consensus-world kept picking up speed and going hyper, all kinds of interesting things were popping. The razzle-dazzle got brighter, and the pyrotechnics were grand. Busy, busy, busy was the order of…
It occurred to me that the most effective “time management” stance is basically saying “no” to all the things you’re asked to do – either by your own self or by other people — until you get to a thing to which you can or want or have to say “yes.” The “yes” is your “Go.” Ideally whatever task pulls that “yes” from you is one that you think will make some sort of difference in your life – one…
