Time Management is a Lie: Why You’re Failing to Manage Your Time

I know why you’re here. You’re here because you’re frustrated about how few hours there are in the day. Time is always running away from you, or you never know where it’s gone. One minute, you’re waking up at your alarm; the next, it’s 4 pm, you’ve only answered one email, and you can’t even remember even a fraction of the posts you’ve liked on Instagram.

You’re falling behind on your work, missing deadlines or scraping them through at the last minute, and you’re constantly playing catch up on Monday morning for everything you failed to get done last week; meanwhile, your hobbies are rotting away in the corner of your brain, you’re stressed out about how many texts you’ve yet to answer, and you haven’t seen your friends in months.

You’re here because you’ve identified that you can’t manage your time and want to change, which is an excellent observation, and you should be proud of yourself for taking this step.

But I have some bad news. You’re here because of the biggest mistake you’re making concerning time management. You’re bad at time management because you’ve set yourself up on an impossible task, chasing an illusionary concept. You’re not Dr Strange: you can’t manage time.

Time isn’t a Manageable Resource

Unlike money, your caloric intake, the amount of sleep you get a night, and the stressors you expose yourself to, time isn’t manageable: it's an entity out of your control that is constantly depleting. By stressing over the hours in the day, how many hours you’ve lost or need to gain, how many busy and free hours you have, etc, you immediately lose the battle by prioritising a resource you have no control over.

Most productivity gurus who discuss time management are almost always proponents of the Getting Things Done Method created by David Allen. But David Allen never discusses how to manage time. Actually, he says the opposite:

“You can’t manage time; you actually only manage what you do during time. So the management issue is not so much about time; it’s more about how do you manage your focus, how do you manage your actions and your activities in terms of what you do.”

So, if you’re someone who thinks you’re terrible with time management, it’s time to change your mindset. Time management is impossible, and you’ll contort yourself into mental knots for the rest of your life trying to grapple with it. You need to identify what your time management troubles really are: they’re never anything to do with time; they’re something to do with how you’re performing as an individual.

“Time” is a generic filler noun that masks something deeper that you’re struggling with, and what that thing is is down to you to identify. There are several possible alternative frameworks for your time management failings. Instead of a failure to manage time, you’re more likely failing to manage your:

1. Focus

2. Energy

3. Stress

4. Priorities

5. Behaviours and Habits

6. Negative Thought Patterns

7. Anxiety

All of those things are manageable entities, but the degree to which they’re troublesome will be unique to you, and there may actually be a combination of factors that you’re masking and housing under the umbrella term “time”. For example, your inability to manage time may be a combination of you not addressing your stress, which usually leads you to binge-watching videos or doom scrolling on social media for hours, ultimately resulting in you feeling emotionally and mentally drained. But, at the end of the day, you blame yourself for not managing your time better.

When we start blaming a lack of time or our ability to manage time for the reason we fail at meeting our goals, neglect our relationships, fall behind on studies and work, and adopt an unhealthy lifestyle, we let ourselves down by refusing to look in the mirror and address the real issue.

Stop using Time as a Scapegoat.

Time is a very useful scapegoat that prevents us from taking the more painful path of self-reflection and analysis and making positive changes. For example, last year, I stopped working out. I went for months without touching the gym, and I told myself it was because I didn’t have the time now I was running my own business and working on my PhD. But it wasn’t that I didn’t have the time; it was because I failed to adjust my lifestyle to make space for prioritising my health and fitness. Returning to the gym involved many stages of unravelling my mental blockages that constituted my inability to wake up and go to bed earlier, my body image, anxiety and overall confidence to go outside.

Overcoming these issues wasn’t an easy overnight process, and it’s still something I have to actively work on, but now, I’ve got to a stage where the gym is back in my life weekly, and I’m slowly building it back up to it being a daily ritual as it was a year ago.

What to Do Next

1. So, if you struggle with what you’ve been labelling as “time management” for years, the first step is to identify what you’re actually struggling to manage and rename it accordingly. Whether that’s stress management, prioritisation, your focus or negative thought patterns, those issues need to come to the forefront of your mind and push aside the concept of time once and for all.

2. Once you’ve identified what you’re struggling to manage, you can start building an action plan to address these issues by identifying how they impact your life. To do this, you need to have a vision for your life: what would your ideal day look like in an ideal world? How would you ideally like to spend your time? Identify how you’d like to spend your time and then compare it to how you spend it. It’s unlikely they align, so how is your bad management of x and y preventing you from spending your time in your ideal way?

3. Prioritise your life based on your ideal vision for how you’d like to spend your time. Your vision for how you’d ideally like to spend your time will reveal a lot about the things you’re wasting your time on and the things you’re not doing, and swapping over these habits is one of the easiest things you can do. You may ideally like to spend more time reading or playing the guitar, but then you look at how you spend your evenings and realise you’re spending hours you could be reading scrolling on social media or watching The Kardashians. Reprioritise what you want more of in your life and sacrifice the things you don’t truly care for or did not envision in your ideal time concept. Trust me; they won’t be missed.

4. Learn to forgive yourself for how you spend your time. None of us are perfect, and some days we will beat ourselves up because we napped more than we’d have liked or didn’t go to the gym as we told ourselves we would or read fewer academic articles in a day than we anticipated. Beating yourself up over how you spent your time doesn’t change how much time you’ve got: life won’t give you a do-over, and the negative feelings about yourself will only ruin the rest of the time you have by negatively impacting your sleep, self-image, confidence and motivation. Self-flagellation won’t galvanise your motivation to do better the next day, so drop the bad habit, forget how you spent your time yesterday and focus on how you want to spend your time today.