Time Management Practices

Reader Avi asks a great question:

I love cooking. I can create a lineup of complicated dishes and never get tired. Cooking doesn’t take away any energy. To the contrary, it gives me energy because I enjoy it.

Cleaning, on the other hand, saps my energy. I wash a single sink and need to sit down. The physical effort is a lot smaller yet it tires me a lot more because I don’t enjoy the activity.

Enjoyment is not the opposite of productivity. It’s what makes productivity possible. We do enjoyable activities to replenish our energy supply. But many people squander this energy by opening a channel through which it escapes. This channel is called guilt.

Let’s say your enjoyable, energy-producing activity is watching cat videos on Tik Tok. But you feel guilty about it. You tell yourself that you are lazy, a procrastinator. All of the energy you harvested from watching the videos gets invested into these feelings of guilt. As a result, you need to watch more videos. Then you feel even more guilt. And this requires more cat videos. In the end, you spend an enormous amount of time on the videos and still have no energy because you were throwing it away the second you got it.

All it takes to solve this issue is to realize that the videos and the productivity are not in conflict. The videos are like sleep. If you deprive yourself of sleep in order to work more, what will happen? Soon enough, you won’t be able to work at all.

My birthday enjoyment program isn’t really about the birthday. It’s about April, the last full month of the academic year. It so happened that my birthday is in April. If it weren’t, I’d still be doing the same intense enjoyment because I need to replenish my energy supply.

I get a lot done. People laugh when they see my CV, especially if they know about everything else I do. How is it possible to do so much when you spend so much time doing nothing? they ask. But that’s precisely why. I have an energy-maximizing lifestyle. The moment I became department Chair I stopped answering emails after 5 pm and opening my laptop on weekends. Because I had more work I knew I would need a lot more time lounging on my bed with my sticker books and color markers.

If you have an unpleasant but necessary activity, you need to book-end it with purposeful, guilt-free activities. For example, I hate signing contracts. It’s not hard but it’s very boring. It’s dumb mechanical labor that is often useless because most of the contracts have to be re-done and re-signed several times. Knowing that I’ll have to dedicate 40 minutes to the contracts this morning, I drove to my favorite part of town and I’m walking around in the mist writing this post. Yes, I should be in the office signing the contracts but the walking and the posting are refueling me for the signing of the contracts. I’ll breeze through them in 20 minutes instead of 40 because I refueled.