Everything we think about time management seems to be wrong

It very well might be. And that’s sad, because you could pretty easily call modernity “The Time Management Era,” and there’s a lot about effective time management tied to making people richer.

Why are we getting it so wrong?

We tend to over-focus on stuff like “the to-do list,” which then extends into how we conceptualize meetings. In reality, to-do lists are a massive disaster and only about 11 percent of people accomplish them in a given day.

Why would that be? Well, oftentimes they’re hastily thrown together and they’re not tied to priority in any way. They’re tied to either:

• Box-checking
• Feeling busy, i.e. feeling high
• Completion of task work

The thing with checking boxes or task work is that, the next day, it’s just more and more checking boxes and task work. This creates the white-collar hamster wheel. To-do lists don’t often get you out of that.

What might?

Here’s some stuff from the TED Ideas Page:

But there’s a third criteria considered by a group of people whom Vaden calls “time multipliers”: significance. Rather than asking “What’s the most important thing I can do today?”…