Seneca's Time Management

For this assignment, I started by reading Four Questions to Help You Overcome Procrastination. It was a short read and I thought it would be useful for the future. The first question seemed particularly helpful for me: What one thing can I do to get started? I am a list person, so whenever it is time to tackle a large project, I get easily overwhelmed. I try to parse it out and tackle smaller things, but it is always daunting. I think this question would help me with the hardest part of just beginning.

However, anything I learned from the first article was grossly overshadowed by the questions I was left pondering after reading Why time management is ruining our lives. I think I will have to go back and reread this article several times to fully appreciate all  the points the author makes and the questions it poses to the reader. A few quotes particularly got to me:

"Given that the average lifespan consists of only about 4,000 weeks, a certain amount of anxiety about using them well is presumably inevitable: we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make infinitely ambitious plans, yet almost no time at all to put them into practice."

"Plenty of unpleasant chores are essential to survival. But others are not – we have just been conditioned to assume that they are. It isn’t compulsory to earn more money, achieve more goals, realise our potential on every dimension, or fit more in. In a quiet moment in Seattle, Robert Levine, a social psychologist from California, quoted the environmentalist Edward Abbey: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”"

"This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily, and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live." -Seneca

"The Persistence of Memory" 20th century painting by Salvador Dali
Posted by Via Tsuji Source: flickr

Being raised in the United States, I was taught good people are efficient and have marvelous work-ethics. Yet I would read Roman and Greek philosophers who stressed "seize the day" and to not continue living in the cave watching shadows dance. I wanted to speak French whose people are notorious for their short work weeks, long vacations, and lack of efficiency. I have often feared growing up and entering a job in which I live for the weekend and dread every hour of work. 

I entered this assignment hoping for some tips on how to manage my time and have come out of it wondering why my time needs to be managed. I have goals I want to accomplish in life, but can't forget to live life between the accomplishments. 

As I said, I will definitely have to reread that article and do further research on this topic because for the moment, I feel a bit lost. I thought I knew what I believed in regards to goals, time, and life. I knew I had more to learn, but for now I feel the foundations of my beliefs shaken. However, until I figure how to live my life, how to tackle the fear of death, and why time needs to be managed, I do plan on doing my assignments this semester. Maybe I will have to stick to more articles like the first one to do so.