In a couple of days, I’ll turn 41 years old. As I prepare to start my 42nd trip around the sun, I’m trying to come up with a time management system that sits well with my philosophy and doesn’t repeat the same mistakes I always make, as I talked about in my last post on timetables.

There is one problem with not having a timetable and deciding every morning what you’re going to do that day. If you don’t have a long term plan or a deadline, you can end up doing very little each day. And when multiple days of low productivity cluster together, it can make you feel negative and low.

So, I was trying to come up with a long term planning system that will work for me. Just like with my timetable obsession, my usual solution to making plans is to start with goals for the year. Then break them down into quarterly goals and then monthly goals and then plan the weekly tasks for the first month in more detail and then take it month by month. But just like with timetables, this approach has never really worked for me. And I was trying to figure out why that is.

One reason it doesn’t work is because I try to cram too many things into the year. Another reason is that life is just not that simple. Life is chaotic and you can’t plan it as if you’re a machine.

Whenever I try to plan for fewer things, I feel guilty. I feel as if I’m not aiming high enough or achieving my full potential. Recently I’ve become more aware of this feeling. I think it is a social construct of our modern times. I call it the Cult of Productivity.

In our capitalist society, we’ve become worker-consumers. We used to be hunter-gatherers and then we became farmer-herders and now we’re worker-consumers. And there is a strong undercurrent in our culture that puts pressure on us to consume more and more and to judge our self worth in how much work we can do or how productive we can be. Even though, our culture doesn’t glorify work, it still puts pressure on us to ensure that we don’t ‘waste’ our time.

The scare quotes around waste are important because we waste so much time on social media. But it’s not really waste because we are consuming that media. But the pressure to be productive can be seen in people listening to podcasts while working out or audio books while running. As a creative, I’ve seen other creatives who have one screen dedicated to streaming shows and videos while they work on their art. We’ve forgotten how to just sit and do nothing. Any lull in the present moment has to be filled with quickly checking our phone to see if we have a notification.

A lot of these problems are related to the addictive design of phones and social media but the cult of productivity is also underneath all that. It’s almost like we’re saying that an unproductive (and undocumented) life is somehow not worth it.

My ideas on this topic are still hazy and I need to think more about it. But for now, I’ve come up with a nice system of planning that’s different from what I’ve used so far. My day will still be open and I’ll be trying to get in all the things I mentioned in the last post. But the main tasks for the day will be chosen based on whatever project I’m working on that week.

Every week I’ll work on a single project. No more, no less. And the deadline will be that week. No extensions allowed. If I don’t finish it in time, then it’s a failure. I want to attempt 48 projects in the next year till my next birthday. If a project is too big, I’ll break it down into smaller sub-projects that can be done within a week.

This means that I’ll have a goal each week and I can set up each day to make strides towards that goal. But there’s still enough room for flexibility because if I can’t work on it one day, I can always try to catch up towards the end of the week. And if an entire week goes bad, I can restart on a new project next week.

I have decided on projects for the first three weeks of the year. I’ll only add new projects for the next few weeks at a time so that I can use what I learn to adjust the kind of projects I choose. The first project is going to be an article I want to write. A well written piece of creative non-fiction. Can’t wait to start in a couple of days.

Cover Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash