“The annual time use survey, which asks thousands of residents to recall every minute of a single day, is important to economists trying to value the time spent by those not bringing home a paycheck.”

The part that amazes me is how much time people put towards TV and movies. I like my down-time as much as the next person, but this is out of hand.

“You eventually learn that true priorities are like arms; if you think you have more than a couple, you’re either lying or crazy.”

He goes on to say that your priorities are what you are doing, not what you might theoretically like to do at any given moment.

“Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely — and this is really the important part — everything else in the universe can wait.”

I like to think of this in terms of checking email at work. Any any given moment during the work day, you can work on a project, or check your email. It is true that checking your email can lead to changes in a current project, but, at the moment when you pulled yourself away from whatever “priority” you were working on to check your email (before you knew what the contents of the email – which might have simply been some company wide memo about Earth Day), your priority was checking your email, not working the project.

As Merlin says, the priority was observed, not assigned.

We live our lives around the clock. We wake up at a certain time, work on a schedule and base our performance on the amount of time it takes us to do things. More things done in less time = good. More time needed? Deadline not met? Unacceptable.

But it’s not just the clock that gives us anxiety; it’s basing our worth on how productive we are. We have this false belief that if we just finish everything on our to do lists, we’ll be done. After that, we can finally be happy, right? Unfortunately, that time never comes.

I think the root problem is not with a wish to be productive, but more to do with the fundamental disconnect between planning projects and executing them. If you took the script of how a project actually unfolded, and sent it back in time to when the project was being planned, most people would look at it and say disagree: “it won’t really happen that way”. Planning seems to invariably hope for the best (the happy path) and more accurate dates seem to feel invariably pessimistic with a lot of padding. This, I think, is the disconnect with deadlines and where the anxiety comes from.

He quotes the NY Times, who had a great infographic showing that a large part of your office time is lost to “Interruptions by things that aren’t urgent or important, like unnecessary e-mail messages” and Merlin then asks this question:

What does a company get out of its employees spending half their day using an email program?

He goes on to put a lot of thought into the question – and if some days you feel overwhelmed by your email, I highly recommend the read.

In the cases where people reported managing their time, they more often reported experiencing burn-out, they didn’t know how much longer they could go on at their particular job or lifestyle. There was often a sense of helplessness and overwhelm.
…
In almost every case [where people manage their attention], these professionals reported experiencing “flow” (a la Csikszentmihalyi) in their work.

“researchers found that workers who used instant messaging on the job reported less interruption than colleagues who did not.”

Which is absolutely amazing because it’s the exact opposite of conventional wisdom. I can’t even tell you how many people I’ve heard shoot down IM because it’s “more ways for people to interrupt me”.