highly sensitive power

Time management is only necessary when the things we want to accomplish threaten to take up more time than we easily have for them. Since I know that my high sensitivity steers me toward wanting to please others and I can usually see a lot of subtle ways to make things more complete or useful or perfect, which often takes more time, it’s crucial to be selective about what gets added to my To Do list. It’s particularly important to make sure I’m the only one adding tasks to my To Do list, even if it means challenging our society’s current assumptions on the topic.

I’m old enough to remember the days before answering machines, when the phone simply rang until someone answered or you hung up and tried again later. The advent of the answering machine triggered a conceptual shift in our culture. Now the ball is in my court if I arrive home and check my messages to find that you’d like me to call you back. You assume, and society appears to assume, that I’ll add that new, unsolicited task to my own To Do list. I’d frankly rather leave it on yours.

The point here is not that message systems are bad (not at all) but that we can consider action-requesting messages from others – whether they arrive to us via voice mail, email, or even in person – to be optional additions to our own To Do lists. Because this is not the norm, a short conceptual adjustment phase may be necessary for people who are used to equating making a request to making a tick mark on their own To Do list. In my experience, the adjustment phase is short. People get used to calling back if they haven’t heard from me as soon as they’d hoped. They get used to my lack of urgency regarding their “emergency.” And because of that shift, my To Do list is a shorter, more controllable and friendly guide, less inclined to expand without my consent.

Years ago, Tony and Robbie Fanning wrote a book called Get It All Done and Still Be Human. At the end of the book there’s a very short chapter in which the Fannings explore another way of time management:

“There are people in the world who have absolutely no problems with managing their time. They seem to float along, rather unhurried, rarely upset, getting done almost everything they want, and try as you might, you never see them popping tranquilizers or hitting the bottle behind the dieffenbachia….We asked such a person what rules, if any, he followed. Irritatingly enough, he had none. So we asked him to describe the way he attacked life. ‘Attack?’ he said. This was not a familiar concept for him. Eventually, in his own good time, he gave us the following list:

10 Relaxed Rules for Managing Time

1. Break it up – then start only what you can finish.
2. Do the least you can.
3. Ask yourself, ‘Who says I have to do this?’
4. Ask yourself, ‘Who says I have to do this?’
5. Ask yourself, ‘Who says I have to do this now?’
6. Wear a watch without a second hand, if you need a watch at all.
7. Learn to say ‘Yes!’ to insistent people, and then don’t do it after all.
8. Tell yourself, ‘Ten years from now, this will seem unimportant.’
9. If you absolutely have to do something, set aside some time for doing it when you don’t need to eat or sleep.
10. Try real hard not to worry about getting things done.
11. Only buy clothing with pockets; otherwise you’re always looking for a place to put things.
12. Don’t live by slogans – thinking is better.
13. Don’t go by the numbers; don’t think in categories.”