Business View Magazine | April/May 2022

19 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 4 P eople speak of the concept of time management as if it’s something that actually exists. It’s discussed, debated, dissected, and delivered in seminars and presentations. It’s more or less universally accepted as an indispensable tool of the busy entrepreneur and the disorganized executive. Without it, their schedules would fall apart faster than a piece of particle board in a driving rain. There is a plethora of definitions for time management, with no two being quite alike. Here is one that seemed to encompass the most common elements of all the definitions I found: Time management is the process of deciding on the order in which you will do tasks and making sure that they are done on schedule. It’s a fairly straightforward definition, and one which, at first glance, would seem to be relatively easy for anyone to comprehend. What’s more, if you personally subscribe to this definition, you might even be able to complete a large volume of work on schedule. There’s just one tiny problem: real time management doesn’t actually exist. Time management is an illusion. We wish we could manage time, as if to say we could control it. We can’t. Time is forging ahead - there is no stopping it, no buying more of it, no borrowing, no renting, no bartering with someone else’s. You get 24 hours a day. So does your neighbor, your co-worker, your Uber driver – everybody. Think of it this way: time, like gravity, weather, and reality shows, are forces we can’t manage. I hate being the bearer of bad news, but all these elements are completely out of our control. (OK, we can turn off reality shows, so maybe that’s a bad example.) What you can manage is you. If it rains, you can wear boots and use an umbrella. We can use these items when it rains, but we aren’t “managing rain.” We are adapting to the conditions generated by Time Management Doesn’t Exist. Self-Management Does. Written by Sophie Chiche Sophie Chiche, CEO of becurrent