Effective time management is about setting priorities and meeting deadlines? It’s about organising your day and minimising the time you waste?

Wrong. These are tiny marginal factors that barely affect it.

When you look back on a life, or part of it, you convert it to a linear narrative. The same with history. We invented the wheel and writing and the printing press and then the Internet and …

However, when you live a life, it’s not linear. Neither is history. The world went from the printing press to the Internet via slavery and two world wars.

Effective time management is about staying in the narrative. It’s about making sure that you’re investing your time in the centre of the future story. Not into a footnote.