A few weeks ago, at Centennial College where I teach, we realized things were reaching a breaking point. Students faced a never-ending stream of deadlines. Faculty appeared completely stressed out. And everybody seemed at wit’s end. So, we invited in a campus counsellor to conduct a stress workshop. Eventually, she just asked straight out, “What seems to be the problem?”
“I can’t seem to get things done,” one student said. “There’s never enough time.”
I had to agree. In specific terms, our journalism students had faced a particularly heavy workload this semester. They had covered the municipal elections – including all-night coverage of the mayoral and council races across the GTA. They had generated something like 200 stories for our online newspaper causing our website to absorb in excess of 42,000 hits (visits on the Internet) up to and including election night. And as a result, college IT staff, technicians and faculty editors had to put everything else on hold while the college paid full attention to the election, Oct. 25.
The counsellor leading the workshop suggested that everybody had to learn to organize better; she called it “clarifying goals and tasks.” She said we needed to plan our agendas more effectively; she called it “focusing on the essential and eliminating the extraneous.” And she suggested we write things down in order of importance; she used that horrible business cliché “prioritizing.” I didn’t particularly agree with the lingo, but she was more or less right. Once upon a time, we called it “time management.”
She really didn’t have to tell me. I knew exactly what she meant.
These days, it seems everybody is racing against time – not managing it. Those who commute to the city, for example, now find they have to set the alarm earlier, leave home when it’s even darker and race to beat the traffic, just to get to a daily destination on time.
Make note of anybody who runs a successful small business and you’ll observe an entrepreneur who’s keenly in tune with supply and demand, aware of every customer’s special needs and able to time everything in a workday to the second.
And observe the parents (especially single parents) of young children and you’ll likely get a textbook lesson in the art of motivating others, fulfilling commitments and choreographing lives through just-in-time schedules every day.
A friend of mine in Saskatchewan wrote me two emails last week. In the first one he politely requested I send him some biographical information he needed. Then, in the second one, he threatened – in jest – that he’d publish some embarrassing pictures of me if I didn’t come through with the data he needed. I fulfilled his request almost immediately. And he noted the method in his madness.
“If you want something done,” he said, “give the job to a busy person. He’ll find the time.”
Last week included Remembrance Day. For me, it’s among the most important times of the year, a time when I feel obliged and motivated to give time. It was important, I felt, to meet every demand on my time. I met with students who needed to know the significance of Nov. 11. I met with families of vets and war dead who needed some consoling.
I delivered about a dozen speeches, presentations and interviews with veterans in front of audiences and Remembrance services. During the week of travel, arrival, set-up and talks, I had to time things almost to the second. Even though my route took me to Kingston, St. Thomas, Shedden, Whitby and in downtown Toronto, only once did I fear that I would be late for an engagement.
I had cut a return trip to Uxbridge to our annual Oilies Remembrance Day Tournament awfully close. As we have done the last few years at the tourney, this year we planned to pay tribute to a local veteran, in this case former Red Cross Corps worker Dorothy Enkel. Plans called for me to offer a salute to Dorothy and ask for a minute’s silence just before the oldtimers hockey game up at the arena – at 12 noon.
Well, I raced from my previous appointment earlier that morning – a talk to the Writers Community of Durham Region about the significance of the veterans and Remembrance Day – and I pulled into the arena parking lot at 11:58.
We reached the end of the stress workshop with out students at Centennial, the other day, and the counsellor wondered out loud if it had helped. I kind of mumbled under my breath, “Not really.” She wheeled around and challenged me. “How could you manage your time better?” she asked.
“If I learned to say ‘No.’” I said. “But that’ll never happen,” I added.