Rhymes with Time Management

No offense meant to the LATI coordinators, but in my experience "time management" has usually been a business buzz phrase for "too much to do and too little time to do it properly." So you learn to cut corners. After all, something's gotta give.

All the time management in the world isn't going to make up for the fact that I have to be on the info desk for 15 of the 20 hours I work each week. And mine is a busy library. So I am reading the Pink chapters and other books at home, on my own time. Likewise, I know I'm going to be spending some time outside of working hours doing some of those 35 resource reviews, because I would like them to mean something, not just toss them off like so much busy work.

Also, I have to wonder, isn't "time management" one of those "left-brain" activities that assumes a given task can or should be completed in a finite amount of time? That human beings are interchangable cogs when it comes to performing certain tasks? Think about it.

I'd like to think that the right-brained "work-smarter-not-harder" theory is really the key to time management, but my experience is that something always gets left undone. That's the nature of priorities—you perform triage to do the most essential things, which usually end up being finite tasks rather than big-picture conceptual brainstorming.

A case in point: I had to spend one of my hours off-desk today weeding a section of the library that has become way too tight. It's a task that waits for someone to have time to do it.