{"id":1002,"date":"2025-06-30T10:12:59","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T16:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/janajm.com?p=1002"},"modified":"2025-07-10T18:49:37","modified_gmt":"2025-07-11T00:49:37","slug":"time-management-long-term","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janajm.com\/time-management-long-term\/","title":{"rendered":"Time."},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cLandscape with a large building\u201d (c. 1818\u201383<\/a>), by Franz von Hauslab the Younger<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve reached the age now where I look back on major life events and am surprised by how long ago they took place. \u201cThat was five years ago,\u201d I realized the other day as I thought about my mid-pandemic graduation from McGill; \u201cthat was ten<\/em> years ago,\u201d I noticed as I came across some old writing of mine.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still not yet at the point, however, where I\u2019m able to look back on the past and tie specific years to specific events or even specific periods of my life, although I do also wonder if perhaps this is just not a skill that my generation has had the opportunity to develop. Having grown up amid the timelessness of the digital present, where everything is simultaneously always happening and always new, I worry that I may have missed the window on learning to think in terms of that kind of spatial temporality.<\/p>\n

I find, in fact, that I think less and less about time these days, in part because I\u2019ve found that I\u2019m able to both get a lot more accomplished and feel a lot more present when I keep my thinking about it to a minimum. To some extent, this is a consequence of the tools I\u2019ve learned to incorporate into my workflow \u2014 I\u2019ve been a devoted practitioner of the pomodoro method for about a decade \u2014 but it\u2019s probably also a consequence of having advanced far enough in my career that I don\u2019t have to think about time as often, not in the way that I used to. Gone are the days, for example, of not knowing how much time would be needed to feel ready for a big exam, or to feel confident in submitting the final version of an important deliverable, so that the only available solution was to dedicate every possible moment to the task until its deadline and just hope that it would be enough. Now, I\u2019ve developed enough expertise in the areas I work in to feel not just confident but also grounded in my ability to get the things I need to do done within the amount of time I\u2019ve allotted to them.<\/p>\n

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In some ways, it\u2019s not even so much a question of time management as it is about a shift in perspective on value. I now place much greater value on the cumulative effects of consistent long-term impact than I do on maximizing individual, short-term gains, and this perspective alone ends up making a lot of time-related decisions for me. When I\u2019m working on the audio engineering for the podcast<\/a>, for example, it keeps me from sinking an extra 2 hours into further fine-tuning the sound quality on a given episode because I\u2019m able to recognize that bringing it from 97% perfect to 99% perfect isn\u2019t going to have any meaningful impact on its long-term success \u2014 and that, as a result, my time could better be spent elsewhere, on the many things I can do that will<\/em> have that effect.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Recommended reading<\/h2>\n