This post is ironic. The number one thing I took away from Professor Schwartz’s seminar on how to succeed in life is that the key to success is time management. Well, after hearing those words back in October, I now find myself writing this post months after the fact, apparently not having managed my time well enough to write it earlier. I had somewhat forgotten the importance of time management before that seminar. I talked to my friend about it, though, and he seemed to live by it. In my first year of college, I was so bogged down with work that life began to feel like a continuous stream of assignments and deadlines–when I was done with one, there’d be another to start on right away. So I didn’t think much about managing my time, it felt like the amount of work I had managed my time for me. But after attending that seminar I started to think about what I could be doing better.

The friend that I spoke to told me that he had been taught that if you do something now rather than later, then you are opening a possibility in the future. Some might say you are granting your future self time. I think this is true, but it makes me feel bad in a way. If I haven’t been good at managing my time, does that mean I’ve wasted my future self’s time? I don’t like the idea that I’ve “wasted” time. I watched a TED-Talk that began as a talk about procrastination and evolved into a deeper discussion of how we not only procrastinate assignments and essays but also put off our goals in life. The speaker showed an array of hundreds of circles, where each circle represented one week of your life (for an average lifespan). I felt a little uncomfortable to literally see my days numbered. I wouldn’t want to go through each individual circle and analyze if I made the most of that week or if I “wasted” it. Albeit, I don’t think that’s the message the speaker was trying to get across.

I have another friend who believes that everything happens for a reason and that there is no reason to regret. Hearing him explain that philosophy to me was honestly life-changing, and I agree with it. We couldn’t be who we are right now without everything that we’ve been or done before. All we can do is accept the past, accept the state we are in now, and move forward. This was a bit of convoluted way to get to my final point, which is that ultimately there is no time wasted. We can start from wherever we are right now and do whatever it is that we’ve been wanting to do. No doubt that time management is important, but life happens in a bit less organized way than that.