For last few decades, every author or speaker on management and self-help has said something about time management. Allocate time, analyze the work pattern, list out the priorities and assign time limits. After all time is life, and one must try to get maximum out of time.
What every one is advising is to streamline the life like a machine. Decide to achieve goals, allocate time, and try to achieve the best in that much time. What about life and living? If these people were to advise the lions in Africa, they would have prepared a time chart for hunting, relaxing, eating sleeping and so on. The lion would have got bored and run away from that consultant. The lion enjoys life on his own terms. He does what gives him joy and forgets the rest. This desire to get best out of time is taking a big toll on very young and old alike around the world. In India, parents give very little free time to a child to be him/her self. It is either school, or classes or homework or a hobby teacher. Everything is structured for a young child. He/she must live life like that and forget the joy of exploring life and enjoying it. Sometimes I wonder that if a time management is appointed to analyze the relaxation patterns and give advice on how we should relax, they will make our life hell. What about creativity? What about enjoying life, the nature, the nights and the sunsets? What about living?
I don’t say that time is not important. I don’t say that time should be wasted. But I do say that we should not live like machines. We are not made to do like that. We fail to enjoy the pains and pleasures if we live a very structured life. We get stressed. And the stress may at times so overwhelm us that despite all the time management, our performance will suffer beyond repair. No inventive or original thinking can be done in given time. Ask a scientist to sit on a chair and think of a good idea in the given time. He/she will fail without doubt. The mind works and produces best results when allowed to be free of the artificial shackles.
Please manage time, please don’t waste time in useless ways of working, but please enjoy your life. Do new things, think, imagine, daydream and watch the stars. We are after all human beings and not machines. Please don’t get stressed by these theories of time management. Get the best out of them and enjoy.
