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Welcome to my article series on time management! If you’re just joining us here, be sure to start from the beginning and read part one here: My Time Management System Part One. In that first post, I blabbed on and on about why most time management systems are pretty useless. I also pointed out the difference between Managing Time and Leveraging Time, showing you why “the time leveraged” is the superhero and “the time manager” is the evil villain in of our world…
Why You Need to Fire Your Time Manager
Now we’re going to dig down into the nitty gritty of why most daily work-time systems typically fail. This will help clarify why I’m sitting pretty here making tomato sauce and you’re probably over there fooling about with lemons. 
As far as I’m concerned, there are 3 primary reasons why being a time manager does not work in today’s Information Worker world…
1. It’s too structured.
You spend hours planning your whole day out hour-by-hour (even minute-by-minute) only to realize that, oh yeah, life is NOT like TV and it rarely goes the way you want it to go. Some structure is good, too much structure is bad. Very bad. (P.S. — Even if you’re just “sort of” doing this, you’re doing it.)
2. It fails to make room for our lame “time wasting” addictions.
Let’s face it folks, we 21st century people love to waste time. We tweet. We update our FB status. We look at our email so compulsively you’d think we’re waiting for a message from god himself (or herself, or whatever). Sure, we need to avoid this crap as much as we can. But it’s really too much to expect that we’re going to eliminate it altogether. Forget about it, it’s woven into the very fabric of our culture.
3. It creates guilt. Lots of guilt.
Psssst… You! Yes, you. Do you make lists? Right. We all do. Lists, lists, lists. To list or not to list, that is the question. And what usually happens to those lists? Well, here in San Francisco we pretty much compost everything. Lists are just one way we create guilt (unless you’re using them correctly, of course). We also create guilt when we schedule that morning trip to the gym for 7:00am and don’t actually get there until 7:00PM…. two days later! Guilt is worthless because it makes us feel worthless. Here we are, being managers again. Pointless.
Why You Need to Hire a Time Leverager
Now that we know exactly why time managing is bad, we can just flip over these puppies and see oh so clearly why time leveraging is good…
1. It’s flexible.
Like yoga. Hey, if you expect to be a guru, you can’t be all stiff and rigid. Not unless that’s what you need to do right NOW, of course.
2. It’s realistic about your constant need for information.
Feeling a little connectivity withdrawal? Don’t worry! Time leveraging systems will help you be more productive AND make time for checking in on Yelp with your overzealous smartphone technology.
3. It creates a greater sense of productivity. Guilt free!
You need to be flexible and you need to make time for web 10.0 productivity. But you also need to get things done. This is our #1 goal — to move more in this direction using a system that actually works without making us feel horrible for just throwing out that Franklin Covey planner.
Let’s face it — we live in a world where everything is happening right now. So many things demand our attention every single minute of every single day. And, frankly, we love it. Call it singularity; call it what you will.
But let’s be honest about the problems it causes.
Because we’re always bombarded with demands on our time, we struggle to get things done during our working time. And that means we struggle to make real progress towards our goals. IMHO, this is a serious problem with very frightening consequences for each of our individual lives and for our entire culture of work, business, and productivity.
So… are you ready to learn a simple method to help you Leverage more and Manage less? Damn right you are!
More to come soon, young Jedi.
In the meantime, leave a comment below about your personal experiences with the evil Manager villain. How have you experienced the downsides of too much structure, information overload, and excessive guilt? Thanks in advance for sharing!
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