One of the aspects of 2Time that I wonder about is whether or not it should deal with the BIG questions of life – Purpose, Values, Vision, Mission etc.
Should I also be in the business of helping people to define their goals in life, and have them become aligned with the loftier themes? After all, my thinking goes, so what if someone is more effective if all they are able to do is to do more nonsense… but just do it faster?
Is it a mistake to disregard these “more important themes?”
In short, I worry that the diagram on the left will come true for 2Time users – making them a bunch of people who are trying to speed things up for no good reason.
Yet, I also often think that people spend more time trying to recover from the mistakes they make in time management, than they do in writing out their top five New year’s Resolutions. In other words, they are more burdened by the time demands in their lives that they think they might have forgotten, than they are by existential questions regarding their true destiny.
Another way of saying this is – the bigger questions don’t matter when you have lost the grocery list for the umpteenth time in the supermarket. In fact, they become very, very insignificant.
Perhaps the person who has mastered their time management skills, however, actually does have some of the brain-space to think about these things, and the wherewithal to actually implement them. Most of us, however, dream the big things and merely leave them on the cutting room floor when we decide that it’s time to get back to our real lives. We give up when we notice that world hunger is a far way off when we can barely manage to eat properly ourselves.
When we tell ourselves that our goals are just too big for our lives, we give up, and retreat to organizing our closets. Which is not a bad thing to do, in principle.
Until we have a way to manage our schedules today, we have no way to accomplish goals that demand better skills from us. The contribution of 2Time is a simple one, therefore. Improve our time management skills on a continuous basis, and gradually grow them to the point where we can not only conquer our closets, and our diets, but also much, much more.