📘 Part 3: Time

This episode's vocabulary

Monk (noun) - a member of a group of religious men who do not marry and usually live together in a monastery.

Essential (adj.) - necessary or needed.

Routine (noun) - a usual or fixed way of doing things.

Priority (noun) - something that is very important and must be dealt with before other things.

Deprioritize (verb) - reduce the level of priority.

Ultimately (adverb) - finally; in the end.

Complexity (noun) - the state of having many parts and being difficult to understand or find an answer to.

Reinforcement (noun) - the act of making something stronger.

Praise (noun) - things that you say that express your admiration and approval of someone or something.

Admittedly (adverb) - used when you are agreeing that something is true, especially unwillingly.

Competency (noun) - possession of sufficient knowledge or skill.

Intuition (noun) - an ability to understand or know something immediately based on your feelings rather than facts.

Articulate (verb) - to express in words.

Daunting (adj.) - making you feel slightly frightened or worried about your ability to achieve something.

Contrast (noun) - an obvious difference between two or more things.

Societal (adj.) - relating to or involving society.

Decompress (verb) - to relax.

Self-actualization (noun) - a person's desire to use all their abilities to achieve and be everything that they possibly can.

Questions and Answers

Maria: Rory, tell me, is time management important?

Rory: I suppose it depends on the kind of life you lead and want to have for yourself. I can't imagine. It's very important if you're like a Buddhist monk or something that's more by accepting the world and flowing with it. If you're a high powered CEO or or just me then it's pretty essential for efficiently and effectively managing everything that's required of you.

Maria: How can we avoid wasting time?

Rory: It's good to have a list of everything you need to do and then tick off the items on that list as you go through the day. It gives you something to aim for and it's present in your mind much of the time. Or even just your field of view if you're looking at the list. The other thing is having a routine to follow so you can basically operate on autopilot and get things done automatically. They tend to go more smoothly that way at least I find. I suppose the final piece of advice I would have would be making lists of what's important and unimportant and then ignoring and deprioritizing the unimportant things.

Maria: Should parents help children manage their time?

Rory: Well who else is going to do it. I suppose if people don't have parents then whoever their guardians are would be responsible for this. Either way the job of the primary caregiver is to encourage their charges to be as responsible as possible. Teachers can help set an example but ultimately the parents have more time with the children. So this is a more effective way of doing this in terms of teaching students or teaching children how to manage their time.

Maria: How should we teach children about time management?

Rory: Leading by example is a good start. Sometimes some explicit instruction is helpful too. It doesn't have to be all or nothing though. You can make a start by letting them experiment with journals and simple schedules before moving on to more complex lists of tasks or just tasks of greater complexity themself and some positive reinforcement through praise and reward would be a good idea.

Maria: Do you think young people organize their time in the same way?

Rory: Well I think they disorganize their time in different ways actually. They make a lot of mistakes but they make different ones. It's part of the process of learning which is why it's not a disaster when it happens. I think a general observation could be that the younger they are the more likely they are to prioritize what they like over what they should do or what they have to do. You can see this in terms of children preferring to spend time more to spend more time with friends over studying for instance and as they get older their competency develops and they become more mature. Admittedly to varying degrees. So the short answer is no and yes and the long answer is no because people are different. And yes because the pattern is the same but the devil is in the detail.

Maria: Do you think planning is important for time management?

Rory: Well, that's a rather core part of it don't you think? It's very rare for someone to just intuitively know how to use their time well without a plan. Maybe they plan so much that it becomes part of their character and they don't need to consciously think about it but they would still need planning prior to that just to gain the experience necessary in order to achieve it. So it's pretty important.

Maria: Why do some people find it hard to follow all their plans?

Rory: I suppose there are three key reasons. Number one, people are busy essentially. It's not that they're evil or they don't care it's more that they have a million plans, and they can't complete or follow all of them to the letter. Number two, forming a plan is hard. Even if you want to form a plan it can be difficult to set priorities and articulate what it is you actually want to gain from the task or or even life in general. And three and this is connected to point two. People are scared. They're scared of or don't believe in the plans because either their plans aren't coming from within or imposed from without. Which is always a recipe for existence and disaster or they've just forced to admit what they really care about in life which I think for many people can be quite a daunting prospect of it contrasts with societal and cultural expectations.

Maria: Do you think relaxing is a waste of time?

Rory: I used to think so but actually it's really important for preventing burnout and other associated medical, sorry, mental health conditions. We can't just be about work and nothing else. We have to take time for ourselves and decompress from just the rat race I guess. And you can ask anyone who has a regular gym routine about that so do they go to the gym all the time. No, they take regular rest days and wear their body to recover and adjust to the new reality as things get more complex and difficult. The same is true for your brain. If you think you can just work all the time with no negative consequences then I've got some very sad news for you.

Maria: Do you think that modern technology helps us to manage our time?

Rory: It probably helps us to manage and waste our time in equal measure. It depends on what you're using it for. So if you use it to create schedules then obviously it's helping you. If you just use it to browse Instagram then not so much.

Maria: And what about the future, do you think that people will waste more time in the future?

Rory: It's a good question. I think they'll spend. It's not a case of wasting time. They'll probably spend more of their time doing fun things which is not the same as wasting your time. For example as automation increases and machines begin to take over more and more of what we do we'll have more time and we can spend that doing the things we love. So as long as they're productive and helpful it doesn't have to be something that creates money it just can be something that develops you then I don't think they'll waste time. I think they'll just learn to use it in a much more sort of oh in a way that enables their self-actualization more.

Maria: But do you think that today people don't value their time? Like they can waste money. They're more attentive to their money than their time.

Rory: Money is a representation of time that you could have spent creating this thing but you exchange it for something else. So people do focus on money but for the same reason that they want to focus on their time because of what it represents. Time lost or time gained. People think because you're just focusing on something physical, that means that it's not worthwhile. But if you look under the surface and a bit more detail you discover that actually they are concerned about their time. They're just maybe not articulating it in the way that we would expect them to.

-

Make sure to subscribe to our social media to see some of the “behind the scenes” stuff:

Our Instagram: bit.ly/instagramswi

Our Telegram: bit.ly/telegramswi