All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else.
Completely unhelpful. And obviously false!
Here’s the easy proof: (1) If it is possible to improve your time management skills, then time management skills can be better or worse. (2) If time managment skills can be better or worse, then some people (or stages of people) are better at time management than others. (3) If some are better than others, all aren’t equally good. (4) It is possible to improve your time management skills. So, (5) All aren’t equally good at time management.
Tyler apparently denies (4), which is weird. It seems to me he’s just re-stating the well-known fallacy of psychological egoism. That each thing you have done is, ipso facto, the thing you were then most motivated to do, does not imply that you were acting in your self-interest. It implies nothing more and nothing less than that what you do is what you are most motivated to do. That is not very interesting. “Doing what you are most motivated to do” is equivalent to neither “acting in your self-interest” nor “managing your time as well as possible.”
Here’s a much more complicated argument from the intensionality of desire. Good time management intuitively has everything to do with coordinating first- and higher-order desires. Tyler seems to maintain that first-order desires are both motivationally decisive (true) and not subject to deliberative or therapeutic revision (false). This implies that higher-order desires don’t really count as desires at all, since they can’t do anything. There is no higher-order. If we are willing to admit that we are always already doing what we most want to do, then it is because we have a first-order desire to admit this. Likewise if we don’t admit this. If not admitting it amounts to an “illusion,” then some people are stuck in illusions because of their first-order desires about what to admit.
Now, while it may be true that not admitting that you’re already doing what you want does amount to an illusion, those of us who don’t admit it may not represent it as an illusion. But a change in representation can create a change in desire. Learning that Clark Kent is Superman may change Lois’ first-order desires with respect to Clark Kent. Likewise, a first-order desire to avoid illusions may lead me to adjust my willingness to admit that I was already doing what I wanted to do. Because of my stong feelings about not being self-deceived, simply reading Tyler’s post may have changed my first-order desires. I have become willing to admit something I was unwilling to admit before!
But notice that I did not previously represent my options the way I did because I wanted to represent them that way. Extensional exquivalence is often a discovery. But we can also induce these discoveries by, say, reading illuminating books on time management. It is a general possibility that redescribing our options can change what we want to do. And if there is some redescription of my options such that I would be doing what I believe I really want to do, instead of what I am actually doing, then it’s true that I have sufficient desire to do what I think I really want to do. I just need to think about my options in a different way. In which case, my “wish” is no illusion.
Some people really do get something out of Getting Things Done.
I think you've got a good point here, Will.
What is strangest about Tyler's comment, however, is that he gives some pretty excellent advice on precisely the topic of time-management. I've benefited immensely from his talk on publishing, for example, and much of its substance had to do with maximizing the value of your time.
Also, your “Cryptic One” handle sums up a lot of what I feel about Tyler.
Your whole post would likely be irrelevant if your conception of time management is different than Tyler's.
Just sayin'.
Better to say, “your conception of the goals of time management.”
I think people act in time management decisions the exact same way they act in intertemporal consumption decisions – they hyperbolically discount future benefits. If I am planning out my next week and choosing whether to work out on Tuesday afternoon or watch a DVD, after discounting all the future utility benefits from each action, I may decide to work out. But then when Tuesday afternoon rolls around, and that extra beta constant further discounts all the future utility benefits of working out, relative to the immediate benefits of watching a DVD, I end up just watching Zoolander.
Things we call “higher order desires” usually have more future benefits and immediate costs than purely “immediate desires.” So I think the issue of time management is one of intertemporal preference inconsistency.
And improving our time management skills generally involves trying to resolve this preference inconsistency. You can announce to the world ahead of time what you plan to work out, so that if you renege you will feel embarrassed when people ask about it. This increases the future costs of not working out. Or you could meditate on the future benefits of working out. This might make the benefits more immediately vivid to you and reduce your beta. You can also work to develop habits that are painful to break. The point of any of these tactics though is to make it less likely that when the decision to act actually comes around, your preferences don't change.
Tangential to your main point, and doesn't contract you main point at all, but…
I endorse talking about “Prioritization Skills” instead of “Time Management”. Time manages itself, regardless of our actions. It is unique among all our finite resources in that it is impossible to modify the rate it is spent.
You can take actions to lengthen your life, and thus give yourself more time, but, even then, you don't get to choose where and when you get to spend those extra days. They get tacked only the end of your life, exactly at the place where you have the fewest other resources and the least potential.
You can only modify the prioritization and the particulars of task-switching inside the time given.
Tyler's quote is a little more defensible if you replace “Prioritization Skills” instead of “Time Management”, because you might defend actually-demonstrated prioritization as the authoritative sign of first-order desires.
I agree with you, first-order desires are subject to deliberative or therapeutic revision. My beef with self-help books is that they represent the time scale of the revision to be on the order of days, where, in my experience, everything _worth_ changing only can be changed on the time scale of a decade. And the title “Ten Years to a New You” would sell very poorly.
This comment is a demonstration of the fact that I am ruled by first order desires.
I have a 30 page paper due tomorrow…
I am pleased by your label. Do note that the sentence was tongue in cheek and thus set off in indented form. That said, I don't think it is so crazy. You make many arguments but the marginal cost of improving your time management is pretty low, so the observed outcomes must be reflecting desires fairly closely. Any one of the selves, when in charge, can write a precommitment contract.
I'll add a query: what does “Getting Things Done” sell for? That's about its marginal value. It doesn't reflect a big shift in time use.
Well, my experience is that the marginal cost of improving time management is very high. There are almost no effectively biding precommitment contracts, and the cost of getting into one is steep.
It costs about the same as any book. Do they all have the same marginal value?
Anywhere I can get a summary of this article? I'm very busy.
im interesed in this too
I agree with Will's general perspective, but I would caution again the facile assumption that higher-order desires are somehow more “real” or indicative of the “true” self. They may simply reflect the reification of first-order desire that are being more or less frustrated in the status quo. Your “true” self, if there is one, may well represent a compromise between competing desires or levels of desire.
If you take multiple selves seriously, then the difficulty (I won't say impossibility) of interpersonal utility comparisons comes into play. There may just be a genuine conflict of interests between different selves. When someone says they want to develop better time management skills, that might just be one (currently frustrated) self looking for a better strategy to use in its ongoing conflict with other selves.
Nice post. More generally, I'm gobsmacked by people–whether philosophers or economists, and it's usually one of the two–who deny that akrasia exists and is important. Sigh.
Thank you for using the word akrasia! Now I have that lovely word, along with the term “psychological egoism”, to brandish like elegant and finely-made swords, next time I am find myself gobsmacked by this same piece of silliness.
FWIW, I like OmniFocus and my old web pal Merlin's Inbox Zero still works for me.
Hello
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It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth — and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.
I'm not quite sure what you were trying to say, though in my opinion at least, Time cannot be managed. Only you can manage your actions, never the time itself
I feel your pain.
I feel your pain.
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