Torch, Winter 1993

BEAT T E Coe • • CoNfEssioNs OF A TiME MANAGEMENT DRopouT by Deborah Bush Haffey T ime management books all seem to say the same thing: You will waste your life ifyou don't have a list. Ifyou ever do anything at the last minute or [horrors] miss a deadline, you should be ashamed. Your lack of organization resides in a foolish refusal to change your schedule, lifestyle, personality, intelligence, rational habits.... The last time management book I was reading was saying something like this as I threw it across the back porch: Begin breakfast the evening before while you are cleaning up from dinner. Fry the sausage while you do the evening dishes.... This assumes that no one in the house does dishes but you and that the family enjoys leftovers for breakfast. If you are having difficulty accepting the structure of this system, then you probably need more free time than you think the system will give you. "Yes, yes!" I cried. "When do I ever get to just sit and watch the birds or stare at the wall?" What you need to do is schedule more free time. That's when I decided to toss books on time management out of my life. The systems required to maximize every minute of the waking day were too restrictive. And what did I know of this author anyway? He or she could be a neurotic list maker who wore a wrist watch with an alarm or never let a paper clip get mixed in with the safety pins. Reading these books made me feel like a failure. I was ashamed to admit that I ever spent a day reading a good book, or that I headed to a nature preserve with the kids and left the picnic lunch on the kitchen counter, or that I never cook on Sunday evemngs. In an effort to bounce back from the crippling experience of receiving The Messies Superguide as a gift, I set out to establish my own philosophy of personal planning. I focused on personal planning rather than time management because planning allows me to exert control over some events of life in order to meet lifelong goals. The Bible speaks not of time management, but of personal planning when it tells us to "Do all things decently and in order" (1 Corinthians 14:40). God does not give me "cookie cutter" advice on time management which requires me to organize my life in exactly the same way as all others. Rather, He Torch 9