Time Management

The minute the very idea of time management is mentioned, I can't help but jump to conclusions about the disciplinary and hegemonic nature of time management per Michel Foucault.  In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about the timetable as operating under a "principle of non-idleness" that originated in monasteries explaining that "it was forbidden to waste time, which was counted by God and paid for by man, the timetable was to eliminate the danger of wasting it--a moral offense and economic dishonesty"(154, Discipline & Punish).  Nowadays the timetable has become so ingrained in our western existence that we have sayings like "time is money," and worse, we internalize this principle to such an extent that one often feels compelled to call him/herself lazy when indulging in extended periods of non-productive time, i.e. idleness.

I am a good case study for some student in psychology or sociology because I find our contemporary relationship with time to be highly dysfunctional and problematic.  And yet, I have to admit that I am one of the strictest adherents to this philosophy.  I am currently in an interesting position because I am craving more structure and even created a timetable for myself this week...and yet, my new lifestyle is kind of rejecting the timetable at every point.  I wondered where our TA timecards are to ensure that I work my 20 hours a week...and of course, I figured out quickly that there are no timecards.  No one cares how much time I actually work or when or where I do it.  This is a kind of freedom I have really never known.  

If you look online for a book that tells you how to reject time management, you will be hard pressed to find one.  I did about five minutes worth of research to find that there is nothing so far that I can tell that is written explicitly on that topic (note: this research was purely for the blog entry and not for self help).  If you are looking for books to help you resist the compelling power to organize your time, you will simply find books that identify this resistance as a disorder and proceed to tell you how to manage your time.  A search on time management on Amazon.com yielded 142,880 results.  The best selling book about time management appears to be, "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity".  It seems to me that any book that is focused on undoing the notion of time being intimately related with productivity would still have to have a relatively productive title that suggests more productive creativity or something like that.

Do you think that at some point people will start resisting this compulsion to spend their time in "non-idleness"?  Like, what if there was one day a year that people around the world went to work and did nothing in solidarity and the people who do not have work sat in front of city hall or something to show that they are resisting the compulsion to either be productive or be invisible.  I mean, I guess the idea of a sit-in is akin to this, but sit-ins are typically related to a specific workforce in a specific place.  I'm thinking like something on an international scale like Earth Day, International Women's Day or International Day of Peace.  The call to action could be something like: time-oppressed people of the world unite!  It's not quite as slogan-y as "workers of the world, unite"...but it is also perhaps less identifiable with a specific political party.  I mean, lots of CEO's are time-oppressed and this could give them an opportunity to join in on the fun too.  I'm just saying...it seems like an interesting idea.