So many of us are trying to manage the busy-ness of the four week sprint between Thanksgiving and Christmas with the aid of technology. Yet I’m beginning to wonder if electronic calendars really assure productivity, or if they simply create the illusion that we can do more with the twenty-four hours that make up a day than our ancestors, who marked the passing of time with pillars of stone or sundials, did.
We need to meet with a client, or attend a board meeting, or arrange an evening with our spouse, so we click to see if there is room in the little window that pops up. If there is, we book it.
What usually doesn’t happen in the few seconds it takes to add yet another commitment to our lives is any real thought given to the needs of our body, mind and spirit.
This is a shift from “do and do more” to “do and reflect.” What a concept! To decide, not just to get something done, but to pay attention to how we are going to go about it and what is happening around it so that the experience will be more productive and satisfying.
Will I have the stamina to see yet another client? Might not that report be enhanced if I leave it for a while and go back to it? Is it possible I will be too depleted to deal with a difficult professional conversation so soon after I return from a stressful family situation?
My point is that the space to be filled, represented by that slot in the window, is something altogether different from the context of a particular date and time.
BYE-BYE BLACKBERRY
Recently a client casually mentioned to me that she had switched from a Blackberry to a paper calendar. Her Blackberry was about adding things to her life, not about planning and reflection, and by seeing a week or a month spread out before her on paper, she is better able to protect time for the part of her job that produces the greatest value for her organization—creative thinking!
This is a shift from “do and do more” to “do and reflect.” What a concept! To decide, not just to get something done, but to pay attention to how we are going to go about it and what is happening around it so that the experience will be more productive and satisfying.
Of course, like any act of self-leadership this requires the courage to be different, which, given the status associated with reliance on technology, is not a small thing.
I brought my first (and only) handheld computer because I was embarrassed to be the only person at the end of a business meeting not to have one when it was time to schedule the next session.
I stopped using it when I realized that it was in my best interests to take note of the day and time and make a decision about whether I would participate after I had collected more data about where I needed to focus my attention and energy.
I did try electronic scheduling—no one can accuse me of being a Luddite—but I ended up reverting by choice to exactly what I was been doing before.
CAN DOESN’T NECESSARILY MEAN SHOULD
In his book Crazy Busy, Edward Hallowell observes that throughout history very smart people have often promoted thinking that was later found to be incorrect (e.g. the earth is flat, or lies at the center of the universe). The pace of our lives may bring forth new ways of responding, but we don’t necessarily have to embrace all of them.
“It may be,” he writes, “that we’re going too fast now to operate by the old methods any longer, but which of the old methods are we going to discard? By doing what we imagine the smartest people are doing, we may be doing it all wrong.”
Nowadays very smart people have developed technologies that let us live our lives at an incredibly fast, almost frantic pace. Hallowell warns us that we are susceptible to deciding, “Fast is with it, slow is dull, and then we will start to get rid of what matters most”—like time to think and paper calendars!
To make a point about being more mindful in managing time, my usual holiday gift to my clients this year will be a paper calendar.
They may not use them, but even if they don’t, at least they will get to see what the open space of the days and months of the new year look like spread out before them and know again that calendars, in any form, are about making us aware of how precious time is, not about filling it.
