Managing “Now”

Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms
of endlessly proliferating possibilities.
—Geshe Shawopa

The real measurement of any time management technique
is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.
—Oliver Burkeman

Today, I want to continue exploring our understanding of how we experience time and its implications for education by suggesting that if all you have is “now,” then what you pay attention to in your “now” takes on enormous consequence.  As journalist, Oliver Burkeman points out, “your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention” (p. 91), and therefore the choices you make about the focus of your attention quite literally define who you are and what is important, meaningful, and significant to you.  Indeed, “what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is” (p. 91).¹

Here, though, is where life in the digital age has gotten highly problematic.  The on-line world of apps and social media are “essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make wrong choices about what to do with your attention—and therefore with your finite life—by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about [in the first place]” (p. 94), and since this persuasion process is deliberately baked-in to the system, “all the feuds and fake news and public shamings on social media aren’t a flaw from the perspective of the platform owners; they’re an integral part of the business model” (p. 95).  Combine this fact with certain problematic hard-wired features of our pesky brains and the limbic system, and the reality so many of us live in today has become twisted and misshapen, almost malignant.  As Burkeman eloquently sums it up:

Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling—instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful—it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times…so it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters.  It’s that they change how we’re defining ‘important matters’ in the first place (p. 96).

Something that as a classroom teacher, I can say that I have witnessed firsthand.  A recent example comes from this past school year when I watched students whose academic records suggested that studying in the library would be a far better use of their free periods consume that time instead, on a daily basis, making TikTok videos—because the videos are now the “important matters” for these children and not their education. I could go on, but I have already written extensively in Chapter 9 about the impact of technology on teaching and learning and the steps we need to be taking in education to counteract its negative impacts; so I invite those interested in a deeper dive into this topic read that chapter. 

Here, I bring up the issue of what our children are paying attention to because having spent an entire year in Zoom school and hybrid classes—with all the consequent damage we now know it caused—I would argue that there are some additional steps we need to be taking in education right now to repair what’s important in our students’ lives.  For one thing, we need to prioritize activities in the physical world over the digital world in our classrooms because learning “in real life” engages more higher order thinking centers in the brain, generates more creative thought, and produces more effective problem solving. “In real life” enables us as educators to redirect student attention to what genuinely matters and to engage them in critiquing what doesn’t.

We also need to prioritize synchronous, collaborative activities involving direct student interaction in our classrooms because they nurture and develop the empathy, communication, and negation skills so desperately absent from the digital world but so critical for grappling with truly important matters. If individuals do not know how to engage directly and productively with one another in the real world, we have no hope of solving the many crises facing it and us, and it is, in fact, a lack of empathy, communication, and negotian skills that is helping foment the enormous political divisions in this country:

A society in thrall to [individualism], as ours is, ends up desynchronizing itself, [and since] grassroots politics—the world of meetings, rallies, protests, and get-out-the-vote operations—are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population finds it difficult to get around to doing, the result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who thrive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected—alienated from one another, stuck at home on the couch, a captive audience for televised propaganda (pp. 199-200).

Recent years have shown how dangerously close we have come to flirting with totalitarianism in this country, and the simple truth right now is that our society is in genuine danger of “coming apart at the hinges” as the old cliché goes.  Unless we wrangle the on-line world and dramatically reduce—if not eliminate—its toxicity, we will not…no, cannot maintain a stable society, and if we do not teach our children what is truly important and how to pay attention to it—modeling those behaviors in our own lives as well—then I fear that I may find myself, like the prophet, Jeremiah, authoring my own Lamentations one day.

In other words, if we do not all start properly managing our “now,” choosing the right things to neglect and teaching our children to do likewise, we may not have a “next.”

¹All material quoted in this posting are taken from Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.

Author’s Note: “Managing ‘Now’ ” is the second in my series of posts about time and education. Be sure to check out “The Clock Is Always Ticking…,” “A Time for Every Purpose,” and “A Modestly Meaningful Life.“

References

Borenstein, S. (April 30, 2022) Brainstorming Dampened in Video Meetings, Study Shows.  The Baltimore Sun.

Burkeman, O. (2021) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

May, K. (2020) Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.  New York: Riverhead Books.