If there’s one thing that absolutely perturbs me about 21st century society, it’s an obsession with time management. Yes, our limited time on this earth is our greatest and most valuable resource. But my experience is that many folks spend more time overoptimizing our schedules and actually waste time in the process. In gathering my thoughts to write on this topic, I did a quick search for the phrase “art of wasting time.” The results didn’t surprise me; indeed, the art of wasting time, at times even having elevated to a fine art, is becoming a lost art.

I’ve worked on some drafts before about how our time at work is being devalued more than ever. A finished product on this subject will emerge at some point. But my reason for putting off such an essay isn’t simple procrastination; rather, I feel there’s a much more positive way to reflect on my own lack of time management in my nearly four decades on this earth.

Many who know me would have a very solid argument for saying that wasting time may be my most practiced skill. That’s to say that it’s not my best skill, but certainly, it wouldn’t be incorrect that I’m absolutely brutal with mismanaging my time. In all the attempts I’ve made to force some sort of schedule on myself over the years, it’s simply made me even more apt to waste time.

Now I’m at a point in my life where only schedules aren’t only unnecessary, but even inconvenient. So, I can now properly reflect on my shortcomings on what society has blasted me for time and again, in that I seem to dilly-dally more than the average bear taking a shit in the woods. I’ve certainly made very poor time management decisions, but so has literally every other single person I’ve met in my entire life.

In fact, I’d say those who schedule their lives by use of a planner are even worse at time management than those who live by the skin of their teeth (sometimes quite literally). This may seem counter-intuitive, but any time I see anyone plan out every half hour of their lives into colored blocks, I become physically ill. I do love colorful charts, but not the concept behind this application. If blocking out your life in highlighter is the only way for you to be happy, it means there’s something seriously wrong with you.

To be frank, detailed daily planners go back centuries, and perhaps even millennia; even then, that’s only considering planners in written form. Schedules are fine; after all, there does have to be some sort of organization when it comes to business, school, or other organized activity. But Life itself is not an organized activity. Life is unpredictable. To not have room for the unexpected or unpredicted is simply dangerous and foolhardy.

My criticism of any ultra strict daily planning is that I find it mentally taxing to the point of becoming unhealthy. Yes, some people can’t function at all without having a strict schedule, especially some neurodivergent folks, but these aren’t the people I’m talking about. I have my own rituals and times of day that I do certain things; we all do, and that’s just human. Routines aren’t my issue. What I’m harping on is actual daily plans chiseled into stone. To leave no room for the spice of life, also known as bullshit, becomes a dangerous tightrope to walk. The worst part is, most obsessive planners never see this coming at all, and soon enough, mental health goes out into the woods among the bear shits.

What’s worse is that young people are being forced more than ever to adopt these super strict blockings of their time. It pains me to see our younglings brainwashed into believing you must do this to succeed in modern society. Have obsessive planners been historically successful? There are most certainly prime examples, yes. Sadly, most obsessive planners have things go wrong, because that’s life. But if those plans were too rigid, then laid to waste, so goes the rest of their lives.

I absolutely despise anyone who forces teenagers, and even younger children, into creating life plans. That’s setting up our blissful naive youth for failure! Any parent who has plans for their kids had better take those plans and give them to the bears to wipe their asses with. Asking a child what he, she, or they wish to do with the rest of their lives is helpful in gathering information about the youth’s mindset. But holding them to commit to the first thing that comes out of their mouths is extremely dangerous. Society needs to cut this crap out!

Not only is our time a resource to be not only used wisely, but also one to be used for what it is: a linear progression along which change is inevitable. Perhaps the best example of this is to watch how financial markets react to certain conditions in the world. Everything when it comes to the financial world comes and goes in cycles that repeat over the long term. Although the actual causes change, the effects are very similar time and again, because believe it or not, humanity has become remarkably predictable on a macroeconomic scale. But I digress.

For a species blessed with talents of reason such as we, it amazes me just how predictable most of us allow ourselves to be. In fact, it may simply be on account of the fact we are brainwashed into this predictability without even happening to realize it. This daily block planning becoming absolutely required by some educational institutions, and by many employers today, is touted to be necessary with the hectic nature of being a lively person in modern society. While most people would prefer order to chaos, eventually chaos will emerge without much warning to finally rear its ugly head to take names and chew sugar-free bubble gum.

Blatant sarcasm aside, as I alluded to earlier, I now look at time as a resource to not only use wisely but also use the benefit of the passage of time as its own resource. What may seem clear as mud one moment becomes crystal sometimes just a day later. What may seem crystal clear one day may one day years later look like a major misstep. Hindsight is always crystal clear, yet I rarely have used the benefit of hindsight to my advantage, and instead let it be to my detriment when I dwell too much upon the rearview mirror.

I’ve often let my writing stagnate within my archives. Eventually, they overflowed so much that, at one point, I’d simply blab for a thousand words and hit publish. Much of what I’ve previously published online is no longer there because I pulled it down out of shame. Too much of it was hurried and rushed out of this feeling that if I didn’t post it right away it would never see the light of day. This is a fear that many writers have more than non-writers and non-artists.

At one point, I made a conscious decision to wait at least a day before posting something. These days, much of what gets posted online these days is older content that has been heavily revised in some way. But, due to much of my past paid work requiring tight deadlines, those time restrictions carried over to my personal work, and greatly to its detriment. Now that I can write and post entirely at my leisure, I simply let things marinate for a while before I return to them and figure out what to do with those pieces. I’m much quicker to scrap junk writing for what it is and only keep what is useful for people to read.

With the passage of time, many things I once wrote are revealed to my much more experienced eyes to be absolute garbage. Funny enough, I do find that some of my high school writings are a bit scary in how well they predicted my future. I knew my own shortcomings even in my mid to late teens, and I deal with a lot of these same issues now. Time is strangely a two-way street, and while we aren’t allowed to physically drive back down the other lane, mentally and emotionally we teleport from one point to another in ways within our life experience that often doesn’t make rational sense.

When it comes to how I’ve come to perceive time, I often think back to a quote from Star Trek Generations. It’s likely one that many people forgot about because that film was mediocre overall. Captain Picard tells Commander Riker that he sees “time as a companion that goes with us on a journey, reminding us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again.” That line has stuck with me since I first saw the film in theaters in 1994. Yet, I often forget the wisdom of those words. If we see time as a constrictive medium, rather than live for the journey and the lessons our life stories inevitably can teach us, we’ll miss the true benefits of linear progression and can find ourselves trapped in endless cycles of unfulfilled melancholy.

If you’ve found that daily planning has been a key to your life’s success, congratulations. Perhaps you’ll be fortunate enough to live out a contented existence and nothing will stand in your way of committing to a well-crafted miracle of temporal manipulation. Unfortunately, most of us trying to manipulate time are only doing so to our own concept of the passage of time. You can’t mold time to your benefit, but what you can do is ignore the inconvenient bits that stand in the way of taking time out for yourself. For many years, I never truly valued taking time for myself, and many people bashed me for being selfish in wanting to pursue my own little hobbies and side projects. I now realize they were all wrong and selfish themselves.

By sticking too close to a life plan, you’re costing yourself the chance at a more dangerous, but potentially far more rewarding existence. If you’re obsessed with schedules, it’s time you figure out where to schedule being able to let loose and allow for some spontaneity and breathing room. Trust me, Father Time and Mother Earth couldn’t care less about your daily planner; they will do what they will to throw a wrench in your gears, no matter what it takes. It took most of my gears to be busted to realize that schedules are useful only for very specific purposes such as organized activities. Now even organized activities are overrated in my eyes.

At the end of it all, time is our most valuable resource. So, let’s collectively take a step back and figure out how to stop wasting it.

~ Artemis Desertsong