Talk about recherche-ing for le temps perdu. My alarm went off at 7 a.m. this morning, and I was surprisingly awake and alert. Did I flit about the apartment, getting ready for work? No, I took my sweet time watching TV and IM-ing, and arrived at the office at… well, let’s just say “later” than I had hoped.
Thus I posit a slacker’s theorem of time management, which I formulated while standing at the bathroom sink, shaving: just as a gas expands to fill a given space, so does procrastination expand with time. (Don’t ask me if procrastination has density or volume. Smart alecks.) This is to say, the more time you give yourself to do a certain task, the more you’re just going to let it slip through your fingers (like sands through the hourglass, if you’ll forgive the allusion to a certain long-running daytime soap opera). For example, say I decide to go home early so I can get to bed at a decent hour. Umm, what fantasy world are we living in? That’s crazy talk. I’ll spend all that extra time on low-priority websurfing, thereby negating all the good-intentioned effort.
Then again, my sample size is one and only one (i.e., me), so your results may vary.
It’s just like salary. It never seems to matter how much money I make, my expenses always expand or contract automagically to take it all, with no apparent conscious effort on my part and no dramatically obvious changes to my standard of living.