by Serguey Shinder
I had a theory about my days, and the theory was that meetings were eating them. It was a comfortable theory, mostly because it was not about me. I decided to prove it, so for one week I wrote down what I was doing every half hour, not a plan, just a record, made at the time rather than reconstructed on Friday afternoon.
Meetings came to about nine hours across the week. Less than I had expected, and not the story at all.
The thing that dominated the log had no name. It was the twenty minutes after a meeting where I was technically free but did nothing that needed a running start. It was the gap before lunch that was too short to open anything real. It was reading a long thread I was not needed on because a decision was being made and I wanted to know. Individually, all defensible. Added together, most of the week.
What made it uncomfortable was that none of that time had felt wasted while it was happening. It had felt like being at work. Every one of those fragments had a reason attached to it, I could have justified each one out loud, and the sum of them was a week in which I produced two things and could not clearly remember producing either.
The record also caught something I would never have admitted to on my own. My best stretch each day was consistently the first two hours, and I had consistently spent those hours on small tasks because they were easy to start, saving the hard thing for an afternoon slot that somehow never quite arrived. I had been putting my most valuable hours against my least valuable work, every single day, and calling it warming up.
I have not become a disciplined person since. What changed is narrower than that. I stopped trusting my own sense of where the time went. It is not a slightly inaccurate instrument that needs calibrating. It is a story-making one, and it reliably produces a version of the week in which the interruptions came from outside and the good intentions were mostly realised.
So I repeat the exercise a couple of times a year, for a week at a time, and I always find at least one thing I would have sworn was not true about me. The log has never once agreed with the theory I walked in with, and it has never once been generous about it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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