My Blender Metaphor

I remember giving out advice to a friend of mine once. We kind of got into that conversation out of the blue. He was none too happy with the way he had with the people around him. It seemed like he was dropping out of relationships with girls and losing friends faster than a can of Bygon can make the flies go bygone. The good thing for him was that his career was on the pick up. You win some, you lose some, most might say.

So we were just hanging around having a casual conversation over a cuppa when out of my mind came something that I think made a lot of sense but somehow eluded me all that while.

I think it is funny how books and people tell you to partition your time and get organized. Decide how much time we want to do what and spend time with the people that we care about and doing the things we need to do. Having it mapped out like clockwork and sticking to it like mechanical is the essence to success in all aspects of life.

Strangely, I didn't exactly agree with what books and people are saying. More to the point, I think the instructions were a bit misleading. See, I do agree strategic division of time and devotion to our different aspects of life is a good thing. It is the right way to move forward. Can't move forward unless we're all organized right?

The problem is, most people follow that advice without really getting the right pictures in their head. Most think that their time is like a pie, or a cake.
Take a knife!
Cut it up and divide!
Partition. Keep it all like clockwork.
Follow like machines!

That is where the problems lie. We start getting so effecient, we either start to hate what we do or the people we know start to hate us for what we do. Either way, it is really back to the starting point.

I think most people miss the key message. It is really not so much about the division, it all has got to do with the proportion. Don't divide and partition time. Proportion time! Think of it of like making a martini. If you will only make a glass of martini. How much vodka versus how much vermouth versus how much ice ultimately gives you how good or how crap a martini you end up with.

So I suppose the books and people with the wise advice were right in some sense. They were correct in a way, to tell you to partition your time. The only problem is, we would've ended up with too many pieces of cakes to juggle. The cake would've been too disjointed. It's so much easier if we had all those proportioned pieces back in one cake.

Well my guess is, for all the wise advice, they simply forgot to tell you to put your divided pieces in a blender.