Task Management
I noticed that with work and school weeks, the daily sleep cycle, and larger intervals like monthly payments or school semesters, I have to take an obsessive interest in time. Any sort of deadline sticks pins into the flow of time and obstructs it. Nothing so strange there, but I can’t seem to meet those requirements casually. I seem to need to obsess over when things need to happen, and this creates a high level of anxiety. On the one hand, during a typical work day, I’m hunting for little scraps of time to work on tasks that would take hours of clear-headed focus. When I actually get to go home and have about four hours to myself, I don’t experience time as the gift it should be. When I get a day off, I see only hour after hour of wasteland. I wonder if I’m not at the point of no return: The only way to relieve the anxiety is to turn my back on everything. I’m afraid I might have wandered off to take a walk too many times when I had serious work to do.
It fascinates me that business management would come up with the task. It works great when you already know what needs to be done. You can’t do it all yourself, because it has to be completed quickly, and a lot of different parts need to be done in parallel. So, it is easy to see that some things are knowable but not doable by one person. In truth, nothing is really knowable. Some things are just more routine than others. Some of the oldest, most reliable procedures still get messed up sometimes, but when you move into the unknown, you’re really asking for trouble. I thought I might learn something about breaking apart the things I need to do. At work I’ve developed a kind of system: lists of reminders. But they’re still not really tasks. Every item on the list is shorthand. Some items are simple units that can be completed, but other items are about ongoing processes.
Posted by Evan Bittner Sun, 28 May 2006 14:40:00 GMT
