time management

Last week I marked another successful trip around the sun — 365 days of adventure. That got me thinking (as birthdays and anniversaries always do) about how it all goes by so fast.

On my birthday I often listen to “Dog Years” a song by the band Rush. The song describes how, for dogs, a single year is more like seven, but that for people it’s the inverse — seven years go by like one.

How true is that? And the older I get the truer it is. Time goes by faster and faster, and despite my best efforts, I haven’t found a way to slow it down.

What to do, what to do?

Crack open my well-worn copy of Dante’s Inferno.

I love that book, and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read it or taught it in literature classes. But it’s something I return to for its imagery and symbolism.

Dante arranges all the sinners in Hell in concentrically smaller circles corresponding to the seven deadly sins. The further down you go, the worse the sin.

It may sound kinda weird, but on my birthday I like to think about the thieves described in Cantos 24 and 25. I’m fascinated that the thieves are sentenced to a such a deep level in Hell.

Why is that?

I think it’s because thievery is intentional.

If I walk out of a store with a bunch of jewelry stuffed in my pockets…well, that jewelry didn’t get there by accident.

Thievery involves forethought.

Stealing from someone else is another way of taking their life.

When thieves steal from you, they are taking more than a piece of electronic equipment or artwork. The theft is about the property, but the property is symbolic of all the time you spent earning the money to buy that stereo or painting.

Stealing my property is, in the final assessment, a way of stealing my time—literal bits of my life.

Time — it’s the most important of all commodities because of its irreplaceability.

I don’t know how much time I’ve got, and neither does anyone else. But one thing I do know is that once time is gone there’s no way of getting it back.

Ever.

So the best birthday advice I can give myself when it comes to time is “choose wisely.” The Inferno reminds me to be careful with my time.

Be protective of your time. Don’t steal it from yourself.

Keep an eye on your priorities. Don’t get bogged down doing things I really don’t want or need to do. I’ve started saying “no” to the things I honestly don’t want to do. It’s liberating!

Call those days spent a day putzing around doing nothing in particular “recharging days” because that’s what they do. It’s life affirming.

Give yourself a present. Change the way you think about time.

I don’t know what it is about the fall. The back to school season comes and goes, and I generally try to have a plan that doesn’t involve our family descending into total chaos and lunacy.

It all starts out so innocently. It’s Labor Day, the end of summer, a chance to reflect on everything that happened during the summer and gear up for the coming school year.

I tell myself, “It’s getting to be fall. Pretty soon there won’t be any grass to mow!” Group skating lessons start for my son… see, it’s no big deal, just a couple of afternoons a week. (well….3).

Then our local homeschool group starts its fall term, where I teach two in-person classes there (always one Shakespeare class and another literature class).

Add in one thing and another, and time rolls along like a rock down a steep hill. Before I even know what’s happened, here I am standing in the aisles of Target surrounded by Halloween costumes and candy, and I’m starting to squirrel away chocolate like it’s a magic stress reliever.

Oh who am I kidding? It is a magic stress reliever!! These days, long before lunch, I start thinking about that hunk of chocolate I’ve hidden in the top draw of my dresser, and during the afternoon circadian trough I promise myself that if I just make it to 5pm that glass of wine or bottle of beer will be M.I.N.E.

I don’t know what it is that makes time speeds up. Maybe it’s all the disruption in sleep when we leave Daylight Savings Time and return to Standard Time in a few weeks? But it’s bam, bam, bam — Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Year’s to a school year that’s more than half over!

In the movie The Incredibles there’s the wonderful line where Helen Parr (Elastigirl) says, “Everyone is special, Dash.” To which Dash replies, “That’s just another way of saying no one is.”

I think the same thing is true with time management. If every thing is important, then nothing is. Not every thing can be a priority! The secret of making time for our priorities are sort out all the things that aren’t. And honestly, when I look at my schedule, I see that most things aren’t really priorities.

In Dante’s Inferno, one of my favorite scenes occurs in the Canto XXIV when Dante encounters the Thieves. The thieves are sentenced to spend eternity stealing one another’s bodies, bursting into flames, and reforming. Dante’s placed them way down in the seventh bolgia of the eighth circle, far lower in Hell than the Violent Against Their Neighbors (murderers) who reside in the first ring of the seventh circle.

Why?

The reason for that is simple. Those who steal steal our very lives. The time we spent working a job to earning the money to buy something is time that is gone forever. When people steal the fruits of our labor (anything from a candy bar to a car), that time — that part of our lives — has been well and truly taken, and it cannot be returned. Also, thievery isn’t accidental…it’s always done deliberately. (“Oh, I’m sorry sir, I just walked into your house by accident and your television set threw itself into my arms as I walked out the door, so I decided to put it in the back of my truck.”)

The real kicker is our lives are finite; our time here is the ultimate limited commodity. I don’t get extra hours in the day or extra days in the week, and neither does anyone else. And I don’t get to add extra years onto my life to make up for all the stupid, wasted time in my youth.

So when there are loads of things that steal time away from my biggest values, I try to make a conscious effort to not steal time from myself. Each fall I remind myself that I need to make time only for those things that are really important. Work is important, my immediate family is important, and certain activities are important, but most everything else isn’t really that important…..except toilet paper. Making time to stop by the grocery to pick some up because we’re on our last roll…that’s important.