Since I was a child I’ve been told that I would have to learn to manage my own experience of time. Childhood was presented as a transition time in which I started to gradually lose the experience of time that was managed for me, management which was done in the basis of care. I was told that this was an universal process and that, making emphasis of the great cost of managing my own experience of time, it was necessary for me to understand that caring for me also meant teaching me to “take care of my own time”. This implied that every person who was spending time managing my time, was doing it in detriment of an ideal management of their own time, and therefore had to be compensated in other way. There were notable exceptions represented in people like my parents, who did it in benefit of managing their own time, because fortunately I was part of their ideal experience of time. This exception however, was not to change the initial conditions for taking care of me, which still implied a progressive expectation that I would learn to take care of myself, and my own time.

My capacity for self-determination was eventually framed in between set points of time, these points would direct the overall character of the lived experience. School, lunch, homework, rest and sleep, started and ended at a set time. An “appropriate” management of my time by my parents and teachers meant that I could successfully focus on a single task at a given time, and that this task would be optimized so that it would synchronize with my bodily and emotional needs, learning program, mental capabilities and individual inclinations.
There was the assumption that, somewhere in the particularities of managing my experience of time, there was an ideal compromise which would benefit everyone who claimed access to that management. Under this premise, the management of my time was gradually delegated from my parents to standardized institutions. As daily maintenance routines were placed into the background of "personal responsibility", the focus shifted to set dates in the calendar, review events which would measure the degree of success that I had in emulating the kind of time management promoted and enforced inside the school premises.

Time passed and personalized measurement grew increasingly relevant, its results would greatly influence the array of possible people I could meet and the places that I was supposed to belong. It quickly became the dominant factor by which the people who managed my time for me would grant leniency or mistrust to my behavior. Like most people who could afford to trust and rely on simple time management to fit in the standardized path that school represented, I slowly learned to navigate the expectations generated by these recurrent metrics.

The key to managing time was presented to me as mastering a set of conceptual and physical tools. It started with distributing the domain of my agency along a linear conception of time pointing towards the future, this was done by extending the reach of a lucid and thoughtful present into a future with the intention of changing it. For a long time after that, it seemed impossible to dispute that those who did not or could not seize the opportunity of designing their own future inevitably had it taken from them and remade into something that only aligned with someone else's designed future. This was also the reason why the figure of my own future was so relevant to my parents, at that time I was part of their designed future, but after I grew they didn't want anyone but myself to design my future. Maturing meant understanding the effect of my own actions on myself and others, and the main way to learn this was clearly by planning and prediction possible futures. The future was there to align estimated effects with scenarios that benefited me and those around me.
Some concepts such as discipline, focus, consistency, engagement, meaningfulness, direction, projection and goal were introduced as necessary components for the imperative task of designing the future. In most cases these were very ambiguous concepts and only acquired their full significance in contrast to the clarity of laziness, distraction, contradiction, vagrancy, meaninglessness, stray, accidental and failure. From now on, these and other similar categories would characterize every action I take, and explaining a situation that I found myself at a given moment was to be done mostly through applying that characterization to any past actions I, or whoever had access to managing my time made.

It was easy to understand that my body contained a variability that would constantly interfere with the enforcement of previously planned scenarios. This fact meant that I would also be presented with the necessity of using physical tools that provided the reliability that my body was apparently lacking. Time management was not such a simple task, and doing it solely through my body was not something that was expected of me, or anyone else for that matter. In fact, even those who had decades of experience in managing their experience of time, those that had successfully inscribed the concepts of discipline, focus, (etc.) into their own bodies, would prefer to keep relying on external managing tools that complemented their bodies. Standardized diagrams were organized to represent the passage of time, and every possible management gesture would also constitute a filling, modifying or erasing of the contents of this diagram. The diagrams and the clock I carried were independent of my body, and if they successfully reminded me of what I considered possible at one past point, it was up to me to "live up" to these past contracts by overcoming the my body's variability. Contingency did not have a concrete place in the diagrams, it could only be construed as a tolerance margin, an abstract space in which I could decide how to deal with each contingency as it happened. It was constantly implied, in school and in my home that the current breadth of this tolerance margin was closely connected to the leniency still given to me, an inexperienced time manager with the lingering wildness of childhood.

The body seems to not be precise or consistent enough, it can't account for units of time while it drifts through the experience of time, but for unmeasurable intensities which can only compare to each other in a qualitative way. After some years I understood that the body always tends to desynchronize with managed time, the longer it goes by itself, without tooled remembrance, without the urgency of chronological concepts, the more it will drift away into an unpredicted future. The needs and conditions of the body are always contingent, which means that it constantly finds new rewards and pains that distract from the planned scenarios and expectations. I also learned that the difficulty in consistently estimating or planning a reward structure of the body was not caused by the body being "inefficient" by nature, on the contrary, natural selection meant that bodies that could do more with less, the definition of efficiency, had a decisive advantage in adapting to new environments. No lineage could survive very long with bodies that were truly inefficient. Of course, the efficiency that natural selection optimizes for is strictly aligned with biological imperatives, which means that it is tested only through complete life and reproduction cycles and modified through genetic mechanisms. The efficiency desired when to managing our experience of time seems to be a different one in kind, one that is fully conditioned by the limitations of individual bodies.

According to every version of time management that I was taught, any time I manage must also be time I want to experience, clearly if I'm not alive to experience time then the idea of managing it seems meaningless. The constant push for chronological efficiency meant a recognition of the ultimate limitations of the body, ones that unlike memory and attention span, could not be "solved" by being externally codified. Even if time was to be managed with the intent of control and the future was to be designed with the intent of implementation, it was called time management because time could ever be at most, managed.

TIME MANAGEMENT