“Time”… management??

Along the course of “Time”, human being is one of the animals who has faced a drastic amount of evolution. Someone who would dive into the literature, written on human evolution, would find this “evolution of human being” to be a fascinating story that would take an entire lifetime plus a little more to finish reading that tall pile of literature. To put in a single sentence, evolution changed us in almost all the aspects. Our physique has changed, our abilities have changed (of course the word “improved” is purposely omitted here), our needs and wants have changed, i.e. some of our needs and wants got outdated and were phased out while new and of course more and more complex needs and wants started to replace those old ones and so forth. Out of all of those changed needs and wants, let us take into consideration this extremely simple yet, extremely complicated “want” in our life “time management”.

At this point prior to everything else, it is quite important to simplify the two terms “time” and management. For an unknown reason, the author opts into the second and the longer word “management”. This topic management has become a hot topic lately, in almost everywhere. Everywhere, in everything, every time we talk a lot on the topic. However for this topic, even though it is much popular, comprehending its core might not be as simple as it looks and feels. Anyways, let us give it a shot. If one questions the author like “how do you define management”, that one would definitely get an answer like “switching pieces of a system, so that at any given point in time the system would yield the optimum results”. Well, as it sounds the statement is much complicated and nothing might seem obvious. This attempt is to simplify the above statement so that it would be less irritating to the people who read this.

“System” is a term that we prominently find in “systems thinking” or in other words “holistic approach”. Here we look at and comprehend everything as “a set of co-operating entities that operates in a bounded environment and interacts with its surroundings to achieve a common set of goals”, which could also be called “a system” in a single word. This approach enables us to clearly define and understand the entities, their roles and the relationships among those entities. Pieces in the above statement refers to these entities. Fundamentally, we set goals, accordingly we plan, execute those plans, monitor the directions and control the directions accordingly to reach the goals. These could be collectively referred to as “managerial functions”. The goal of management is simply to execute those managerial functions so that it ensures the system yields the optimum result.

The immediate next question is “what are entities?” which could probably be followed by “how could one identify the entities of a system?” The fact with so called entities is that they are tangible in one way or another. For an instance one could understand a concept as an entity, which is not composed of matter. Similarly, a premises or a building also could be an entity where the thing is composed out of matter. Both, we can comprehend and imagine in our mind; hence tangible. Second question of “how-to” is a bit of a complicated aspect, which is why becoming a manager is a tough call.

The real problem arises when we start to think about managing time. If one could pause for a while and think a little deeper to figure out “what is time?” it is an obvious fact that we still do not have a sensible definition to this thing called “time”. At least us, the general public has no proper sense of time. Since we do not have such a proper sense, we are finding it much difficult to imagine. One could say that there are seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and so forth. But if someone ask from you “can you feel the expiry of a second?” or may be “if you do not have clocks, how would you know that a minute has passed?” your honest answer would be “no” for both the questions. If not for the sunrise and sunset, would you really feel the expiry of time? Even the sense of “interval” is there because of the sunrise and sunset. What would happen if it was not there? Would we be able to sense the expiry of time? To put it straight in leman language, by “counting time” what we are really doing is counting equal intervals of something that flies away, well beyond our control. We barely sense the expiry of time. Basically, we the human beings have no idea in or out what this time is. Yet we are desperately calculating this interesting unseen “thing” (unsure if you could call that a thing really), plan our lives based on it, makes decision over certain things and so forth. So it is obvious that what we are discussing about here is something that does have neither a beginning, nor an end, nor a boundary. Literally, time has nothing that we know of. So at least for us, the general public, our knowledge on time is almost null.

Next question would be, can we execute those managerial functions over this thing “time”? Like we already have understood, to do that we should be able to realize what entities are there in time. The fact is we do not have even a single entity in time that we can figure out. Having all these fact laying around, if one still says about time management that would simply be a meaningless, or senseless thing to fuzz about. To put it simple and straight, there is really nothing called time management. In fact, you cannot manage time.

“If not for time, then what are we managing?” is an impressive question. What the author suggests is, it is our own life that we are managing. Obviously life is in a way acting as a system. It has a lot of entities e.g. yourself, your family, your parents, your relatives, your siblings, your school, your neighbors, your country and so forth. Time to time you are interacting with these entities in order to attain the goals of “human relationships”, “duty” and “responsibility. To do that you plan things, you set priorities and you monitor what happens, accordingly you change the priorities, some you achieve and some you fail and so forth. All of the aforesaid are nothing but collectively recognized as “life” in a single word. At any given duration or a segment of time, your focus will be on one things. People say that they do multiple things together. But in reality they are not doing things together, instead they do little of each thing in small intervals and rapidly switch their focus. It is the same for all the human beings. This system named life? Indeed, you can and you are managing this. This is the toughest because your existence has a limited time frame, which almost all of you have no idea of when is your expiry date.

At the point to conclude, what the author suggests is, instead of trying so hard to manage time, learn to manage your life. How to do that, is not something that easy to tell. Because that how to is always bound to the particular person, the person’s locality, surroundings, people around, knowledge, maturity, experience and so forth. There is this one thing which is most important. That is “to manage your life right, you will have to learn to say “NO” to many things.” If you can figure out to what you should say NO to, then you have found the right way of managing your life…