Time Management for Mortals (Patreon)

Pretty much done with this one. It will just be tiny little tiny details at this point if I want to change him. Just one more to finish.

Happy March 22nd Everybody

Today is my cousin Carrie Anne's birthday.

Building on my tirade about money and time yesterday:

This morning I happened to be talking with a friend of mine, another painter, about starting band. We both want to do it but we both know it will never happen because neither one of us has time.

"If we ever get rich," was the final consensus.

It reminded me of my old retiree friends from art class.

Yesterday I wrote about the incentive to trade our time for money and security, which is often based on the assumption that we'll be able to do what we really want to do later. The problem being that "later" cannot be guaranteed.

The time problem is so much deeper than that though. It's not about incentives or society or whatever, it's about psychology.

Take my case:

I'm doing something that I really want to do. I spend most of my time painting or thinking about painting. I enjoy the time I spend doing it. Yeah I worry about money and security more than other people who have normal jobs, but that's just the trade off for spending my time doing what I like.

And yet, I still want to make music. I want to make films. I want to write books. I want to go to Italy. I want to learn jiu-jitsu. I want to study ancient philosophy. It's like that meme of the guy with his girlfriend checking out the other girl walking by.

There's a great book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

It's the most subversive productivity book I've ever read. There are shelves of productivity books insisting that you can accomplish anything and everything you want. It's just a matter of efficiency and time management.

What makes this book so subversive is that it makes the case that no, actually, you can't accomplish everything you want.

It dismantles this one metaphor that is often used about time management. The jar, the rocks and the rice. It goes something like this:

To fill the jar with all the rice and rocks, you can't start with the rice, because then the rocks won't fit. You have to put the bigger rocks in first then the rice will find its way to fit in the gaps. The moral is to take care of the big things first and then the small things will fit in.

The problem with this metaphor is that it assumes that the amount of rocks and rice can actually fit in the jar. In reality, we tend to have more rocks and rice than can possibly fit in the jar.

So the real problem is figuring out which rocks to let go of.

I can't fit a band rock in the jar with my painting rock.

However, I think there is a small hack to this. I like to find smaller rocks that kind of resemble bigger rocks that I have to let go of.

For example, I can make short little songs in GarageBand to accompany my videos about my art. It's kind of a smaller band shaped rock. I can't have a writing a book rock, but I can write these little happy days segments and it's a little book shaped rock that fits in the jar.

I don't know. Sorry to ramble. I've just always been sensitive to my finite time of consciousness on Earth. I try to spend it as best I can. I guess I just wanted to share my thoughts.

Anyways.

Have Fun,

Goodnight Sweeties