Managing Time Management

By Lincoln Spector

May 9, 2005

(Managing Time Management :  Page 1 of 1 )

The deadline was fast approaching. In 24 hours I would have to present my report on the correlation between budget shortfalls and middle manager suicides. I still had 15 slides to create, and just couldn't create the image I needed of a man in a suit jumping off the descending end of a line graph.

And that wasn't all. The Sith Lords were on the verge of crushing the Jedi, and I would soon have to choose between the light side or the dark.

At that very moment my boss entered the cubicle (speak of the dark side of the force). I Alt-Tabbed to PowerPoint, spun around to face him, and smiled with all the sincerity of a cat with a goldfish in its mouth.

"George," he said, "we want to use you for a little experiment." I tensed up, but I needn't have worried; this time they weren't going to try exchanging my brain with a monkey's. "Ralph from IS here is going to install a new program on your computer, TimeTattler 2. It will efficientize and productivitize your workday throughput by maximizing buzzword usage—No, that was last week. By tracking how much time you spend on any particular application."

"Of course," I said, wondering how I was going to hide Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords from the IS geek looking hungrily at my PC. "Should I reformat the hard drive, first?"

Big Software is Watching You

The answer was "No." I was shooed away for twenty minutes. When I returned, Ralph, the IS geek, was just rebooting. "All yours," he said cheerily as he got up. "And by the way, you really can't trust Darth Sion."

I sat down and checked my e-mail. There was a long message from my wife. We needed to make an appointment to meet with the school counselor to discuss little Elmer's tendency to talk out of turn in class—usually correcting the teacher.

I was about to click the Reply button when a message box popped up onscreen. "You have spent the last 3 minutes and 14.834 seconds in a non-business-related activity. Click the 'I Apologize' button to avoid trouble."

 Page 1 of 1