Time Management

I find it hard to even think in terms of good time management skills as opposed to bad time management skills. It seems to me that we all have our own stable way of being in a world structured by time. Some people’s worlds are time-structured in ways that are very similar to the way mine is structured whereas other people experience time very differently. I can’t reduce this to having a better or worse sense of time or capacity to manage time because whether my style or anyone else’s is better or worse all depends on the specific demands of the particular task at hand. 

For example, I do things quickly but I can only do one thing at a time. I cannot multi-task at all. When I am forced to try, the result is extreme disorientation leading to an anxiety state so pronounce as to qualify as a variety of panic attack. I am very easily distracted because do not filter background input well enough to, for example, stay focused on a conversation I am having if there is a TV on at the same time. Yet, I can isolate myself in a quiet place and stay intensely focused on a very demanding task for several hours at a time. Under ideal conditions, my span of attention is freakishly long and my capacity to follow and further develop a very complex chain of abstract thought is so far above average that it is not an exaggeration to say that I can do things most people would find impossible. My way of experiencing time and paying attention, including the conditions I need to stay focused at all, is either a crippling disability or a rare gift just depending on what exactly I am being asked to do. 

 

There are so many tasks that are either easy or impossible depending on how exactly one naturally experiences time and focuses attention that I can’t think in terms of good time management skills or the lack of good time management skills but only of a goodness of fit between how time is experienced and the task at hand that makes that task easy or a lack of fit that makes the task feel about the way being forced to try to sing must feel to a pig.