T I M E M A N A G E M E N T
that you kill a little time by working it to death mowing the lawn
or cleaning your room or....
Ah. Boredom isn’t a lack of things to do, after all. It’s a lack
of anything you want to do. Boredom is equal parts restlessness
(exhausted people don’t get bored; they fall asleep) and lack of
desire, complete disinterest in or aversion to any of the possible
activities you might do next.
So, how come we never seem to get bored now?
We still get restless, although less frequently and intensely as
we mature (read “become more frequently exhausted”). And we
certainly continue to suffer from lack of desire (more or less fre-
quently and intensely in inverse proportion to how much we genu-
inely enjoy our work and family life). But always we suffer, too,
from too much to do and too little time to do it. We push on to the
next task despite the lack of desire, full speed ahead.
Also, as we get older, we become aware of the dwindling num-
ber of days left to us. Time seems to speed up with great gobs of
the stuff slipping away when we’re not looking. Even the Mondays
in February become more precious in that context, and we become
loath to wish any of our time away.
What would you give for one of those endless Christmas Eve
days of your youth, when time seemed to crawl and the hours
refused to pass?
Fact is, you still have them, probably several little Christmas
Eve days each working day. It’s called waiting.
We wait for the coffee to perk, wait for the bus to come, wait
for somebody to unjam the copy machine, wait for the client to
respond to our voice mail message, wait for our luncheon date, wait
in traffic, wait at the doctor’s office or the Quicky Lube (which can
never be quite Quicky enough). Time passes slowly at these times,
not because we’re anticipating the joy of good surprises under the
Christmas tree, but because we’ve been displaced from our schedule
and really should be somewhere else doing something different.
Most of us hate waiting. The more crowded your to-do list
or day planner and the more impatient you tend to be, the more