The other day, wanting to make the best use of my time in an airport, I wandered into a bookstore and bought a book called FASTER: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, by James Gleick. It is a fascinating book about time: how we believe we possess too little of it, how we suffer from "hurry sickness." Hurry sickness consumes us in a subtle but relentless way so we forget there could be life apart from it.1
Our vocabulary is a symptom of hurry sickness: "speed dial," "fast food," and "express lane." Some other examples are: "characters per second," "pages per minute," "overnight delivery," "quick study," and "door dwell" (the delicately-timed but agonizing few seconds it takes for elevator doors to close). Drugs are called "speed," taken to provide a "rush." There are megahertz, gigahertz, milliseconds, and nanoseconds, while at the other extreme there is the dreaded snail mail, and worse yet, the waiting room. And then there is that new catch phrase, "real time," which simply means that the speed at which something normally happens. It would appear that real time is now too slow for us, so we have virtual time, compressed files, fast-forward, and instant replay. Look at what we read: The One-Minute Manager and One Minute Bedtime Stories, books written on the assumption we do not have time for the real thing.
Convenience appliances and home products are pitched to us on the basis of how much time they will save us. A popular comedian once said that he put instant coffee in his microwave and almost went back in time. One of our members wrote to me this past year and, as the owner of a private practice, noted "the pressure is on for survival-minded business people to respond faster than the competition does and solve the problem more quickly than the competition can. It is truly a rat race." Indeed.
Nothing delights us more than the feeling that somehow we have challenged time constraints and won, or that we have fooled nature by accelerating growth, sleeping less, working more, and practicing multi-tasking (by talking on the cell phone, listening to the radio, supervising the children, and driving the SUV through traffic, all at once). We love to save time. At one time the old adage was, "Time and tide wait for no man." Mark Twain, seeing what electricity was doing to the world, turned it around and quipped, "Man waits not for time nor tide."
According to Gallup survey research, a majority of Americans, especially baby boomers, feel that they "do not have time to do everything that needs to be done."1 Certainly, there might be some of you who wish you had more to do, but for the most part, Americans wish we had more time to do quality work and still have time to read a good book, get our high-speed internet access working correctly, read the Sunday paper, get some exercise, and spend time with our loved ones.
I have listened as some of you have shared your own time management angst in written correspondence, small groups, and via the Forums. One noteworthy discussion had some of you working 14 (or more) hours a day and still feeling that you had more to do when you left. In response to this, I'd like to relay a story that I once heard. As is often the case with stories much repeated, the author is unknown. I must beg your indulgence if you've heard it before. The story goes something like this:
A philosophy professor stood before his class with some items on a table in front of him. When the class began, he picked up a large glass jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks the size of his fist. When the rocks were level with the top of the jar, the professor asked his students if the jar was full. They all agreed that it was.
The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The professor then picked up a bag of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up the rest of the jar. He asked the students one more time if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous, "Yes!!"
The professor then produced a pitcher of water and poured the contents into the jar, effectively filling the spaces between the grains of sand. The students laughed.
"Now," asked the professor, as the laughter subsided, "what is the point of this illustration?"
An eager student raised her hand and said, "The point is, no matter how full your schedule seems, if you try really hard, you can always squeeze something else in!!"
"No," the professor replied, "that is not the point. The truth this illustration teaches us is: If you don't put the big rocks in first, you'll never get them in at all. What if you had started with the pebbles? With the water? What are the 'big rocks' in your life-is it time with your loved ones, your faith, your education, your dreams, a worthy cause, teaching or mentoring others? Remember to put these big rocks in your day first, or you'll never get them in at all."
Do I have any answers for you? No. We've heard from some of the best at our annual conferences speaking on balance and time management. Most of us just go home and put such things on "the list." Here's what I know: I believe that if we stay clear about the "big rocks" in our lives, we're going to be fine. To transform nursing into something greater than it's ever been, and WOC nursing into something bigger than we've ever dreamed, we have to be happy, healthy, and creative, not exhausted. If we're attentive to our health, our families, our spirituality, and whatever else we identify as a life priority, we'll have the energy to face the changing environment of health care. Ideally, we'll even have enough left over to contribute to the direction of the profession. My plan in three words: Big rocks first.
Thanks for your time[horizontal ellipsis]
Laurie L. McNichol
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