- There's this notion that we have to be the most productive person and make the best use of our time filling every block of our day and accounting for each minute of our lives. It's to be intentional with time but does it reach to the point where we are imprisoned by these boxes? - Is this box like time management the best solution to someone who doesn't have control of their time? - Sometimes we're trying to save time and optimise our time to do something fun. But when we do something fun it automatically feels like a waste of time. It's important to remember what it is that we're even saving time for and what it is we're optimising. --- "You know, I remember meeting someone at a conference once. Within maybe 10 minutes of meeting, he showed me this terrifying — to him it was probably wonderful — spreadsheet of how he accounted for every hour of the day for the last couple of years. That’s probably not even as unusual as we might think, but there was a score at the end of the thing based on whether he had spent enough hours doing the different categories of things he wanted to be doing. I don’t know if he secretly feels punished by his own system or if he feels empowered by it. There’s not really any way for me to know. My skepticism is more about that rhetoric and way of thinking of time as being offered as a solution to someone who doesn’t have control of their time — that if they controlled their time in this grid like way, they could succeed in life. I think that person has the potential to use that way of thinking very self-punitively." "There’s also this irony where, in situations in the past, I felt like I needed to protect my time more so that I could do things that I wanted, and it obscured the fact that what I wanted was a sense of connection and meaning, and in order to get that I would have to do something that looked like giving my time away" "Yep. The closest thing that I have to an answer is that I want to be in contact with things, people, contexts that make me feel alive. I have a specific definition of alive, which is I want to feel like I am being changed. Someone who’s completely habitual, is set in their ways of thinking and doing, that type of person is liable to see days in a calendar as being pieces of material that you use to achieve your goals. There’s all kinds of degrees between that and someone who’s so completely open to every moment that they’re dysfunctional or something, but I want to live closer to that second pole." - [Link](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/15/magazine/jenny-odell-interview.html)