Health and Psychology

Objective, personal, historical--This issue came up in a discussion with a colleague about an issue regarding time and task management.  Here are two people, unrelated.  Jane Doe has an issue with time management.  Jill Doe has an issue with task management.

Jane can't get things done because her ideas about time are related to her personal experience and beliefs about time, and her history of how time works.  It has nothing to do with the objective reality of time as in the time on the face of a clock.

Jill can't get things done because her ideas about specific tasks have nothing to do with the objective reality of what those tasks entail.  She starts to do a task then gets bogged down with everything else that comes up for her as the task starts to progress.  She has emotional, personal, and historical perspectives on tasks that prevent her from managing the objective reality of the task.

To work with these issues Jane needs to work backwards from the estimated completion time of the task in objective reality to the needed start time.  She may need to break the task down into all it's parts to ensure she's accounted for all the time required.  If there's a variable component like "traffic conditions" then she has to factor that in, in objective reality.  For Jane Doe, personal time flies by.  It sneaks up on her.  Deadlines are missed.  Things come up as a surprise.  She has no systematic way to manage the fixed, objective reality of time.  Historically, things will work themselves out.  Historically she forgets things and they are no longer needed.  The loss of time makes for drama, and a heightened sense of being overwhelmed and anxious.  It fits into a world view that includes wanting to be important, wanting to be needed, and wanting to be criticized by others.

Jill is chronically disorganized.  Tasks get magnified and more people get involved.  Jill has problems being assertive, standing up for herself and clarifying what is her responsibility and the responsibility of others.  Historically, Jill would have liked others to take care of her, but they were also disorganized.  She doesn't want to offend people, and she doesn't want to be regimented.  The world is full of exciting possibilities and she doesn't want to lose out on any of them.  She's very good at starting projects, but completing them means they are no longer as full of possibilities as they once were so she stops and moves on to a more interesting project that grabs her attention.  Objectively, 90% of things she starts remain unfinished.  Personally, she gets to feel she has too much to do and no place to do things.

If Jane and Jill start to focus on the objective reality of how they manage their time and their tasks, rather than looking ideally at all possibilities or at imagined outcomes, they will accomplish more.  What stops them when they do this are all the underlying thoughts and feelings that come up as these systems are put in place.  Neither Jane nor Jill are stupid, lazy, crazy, or any of the other terms they call themselves at the start of treatment.  Loss of objective reality happens early for people and is a way to cope with a large variety of problems.  The treatment is to clarify and to focus on the objective reality without any judgment.  Time is.  Tasks are.  These things exist.  Both Jane and Jill will become successful once they manage to focus only on the objective reality of time and task.