Many time management methods come with the promise that you can achieve anything you want. But this is nonsense, on a pure mathematical basis:

1. your available time is limited,
2. any activity takes a non-zero amount of time.

The Time Limitation

Whether you calculate in lifetime or time per day, time is a limited good for all of us. The exact amount of available time can vary from individual to individual: the age we reach, the amount of sleep we need, things we need to take care of just to live at all. For example, Stephen Hawking mentioned in A Brief History of Time that it took him quite a while to get into bed each day due to his motor neuron disease. So he could not spend this time the way others spend it (he did use it for thinking, and maybe we all should reserve more of our day for thinking time).

Whatever your personal restrictions may be, don't try to extend the available time by sleeping less than you need or gulp your food just to save time. This will have detrimental effects on your health, which will turn back on you eventually with diseases that take up even more of your time. You will also work less efficiently, thereby extending the time your activities take or reducing your success. And the whole point of time management is to feel good. If you don't care about how you feel, you can stop reading this to save some more time.

We may not be able to put a precise number on our available time, certainly not our lifetime, and maybe not even single days, but in any case, our time is limited. And this means we can only sqeeze a limited number of activities into our day or lifetime.

Acceptance over Efficiency

So maybe we can try to squeeze more activities into limited time if we reduce the amount of time per activity. This is usually called efficiency. I might be able to write two blog articles in the same time that others need for writing one, so that means I can get more blog articles done or I can do more things in addition to writing this blog.

Efficiency is certainly helpful and I encourage you to find ways to speed up activities, especially those that you feel you have to do but don't enjoy particularly. But it has limits. Whatever you do, no activity will take no time. And when we try to speed things up, we also lose something: maybe the quality of the result, the fun during the activity, and it may cost us more mental or physical strength, which again leads to exhaustion and a limitation of time and resources we have for other activities.

And there are activities we don't want to get done efficiently: daydreaming, spending time with family and friends, enjoying nature, etc. By training ourselves to be efficient with everything we do, we may even lose the ability to enjoy activities for their own sake.

So efficiency is not the solution to overcome overwhelm or stress. A more sustainable solution is to accept the fact that we cannot do anything and everything. We usually perceive limitations as something negative. But are they? Many things gain their worth only by their limitation, such as artwork or rare food items. By being aware of the value of our time, we can enjoy the activities that we do get to do even more and spend less time on craving for other things that we might do on top. Life is not about getting as much done as possible, but about enjoying as much of it as we can.

Take Control

If we cannot achieve anything by the obvious limitation of time and the time any activity takes, we have to decide what we want to do. This sounds trivial, but all too often we forget that we are the ones who can and should decide how we spend our time.

We may not be fully free in our decision. In a job, we are legally bound to work for a certain amount of time and do things that we get paid for. There may also be moral obligations such as caring for children, family members or pets. But within these restrictions, we also have a certain freedom. If we are knowledge workers, our job is not defined in such detail that it would tell us for each minute of the day what to do. The whole point of our job may be to make decisions, and that involves decisions about priorities and how time is spent by ourselves and others. Many business decisions are directly linked to time, such as taking on a client order, developing a new product, requiring documentation. Often managers forget to consider the time resources connected with such decisions (and the time it takes to even make the decision).

Also in other contexts of obligation we still have a certain freedom of how and how much we do them. You are not a bad parent if you refuse to drive your kid to some leisure activity every day of the week. Often we put pressure on ourselves to be the perfect parent, partner, housekeeper, etc. But more is not always better and if you are stressed, you cannot be the perfect parent, partner or housekeeper anyway.

And also the free time you can invest into meeting friends, exercising, DIY, music or whatever you like to do: Make sure you don't pressure yourself into perceived obligations (I have to run a marathon this year). It is your time. If you can't enjoy it, there is no point in doing it.

Caution: Decisions are hard!

All of this is easy to write down or read. But it is immensely hard to do!

Often we are not even clear about our priorities. What do we really want? The simple answer everything doesn't get us anywhere. So what is it that I really want to invest my time in?

When I am done with work, I often feel that I should exercise, having been sitting all day, but at the same time I feel tired and just want to sleep. Or I want to get some housework done so that it leaves my weekend free, but at the same time I feel like just sitting down and watching TV. All of these possible activities can be well justified, so there is no simple answer.

But recognizing and accepting the problem helps to find solutions. I might decide to spend less time working. Or I can take turns: one day I force myself to exercise, the next I go to bed early. Or I could change my standards. Maybe I live with a little bit of dust around me and cut on the time I spend cleaning. Treating time management as a conscious and difficult decision helps to manage our expectations and to find strategies. Just as we know how hard it can be to decide on whether to take on a new job, make an investment or whether to have a child, it is hard to find out what we really want to do with our time.

Limitations also provide guidelines of decisions. We simply don't have to take into account options that are out of bounds. Just as I don't complain about not having a Ferrari, there is not need to complain about not being able to speak 50 languages, play all kinds of musical instruments or not having read every book in the world.

And I can compare options. If I wanted to buy a Ferrari, I would have to cut down on my style of living and commit myself to a safe job with a high income whether I like the work or not. So I do without the Ferrari. And when, in the afternoon, I desperately want to finish this blog article, just to get it done, I should consider the alternatives of how I could spend that time: exercising, relaxing, reading. Sometimes I will stick with the article, sometimes I will decide against it. But whichever option I choose, I know it is a valuable way to spend my time, because otherwise I would have chosen one of those other activities that are dear to me.

Learn More

Read on:

• Counteracting Option Overload (Or: How to get out of the toy store)

Get more tips on how to make decisions about how you spend your time:

• One Question to Reduce your Workload by Half
• How to stop – Never work overtime again