From its title, you might expect this to be another one of those ‘self-help’ books about time management, but people who read this book hoping for advice on how to change their lives might be disappointed. For anyone interested in how people think and act, though, it will be an interesting and sometimes surprising read.
The first part, which looks at the working methods of successful creative people like writers and artists, does have some general tips. The one thing that most of them share, for example, is having a regular working routine and keeping to it. Some perhaps take this a bit too far. The composer Beethoven used to start each day with a cup of strong coffee made with exactly sixty coffee beans, which he counted out personally. And there are stranger examples than that.
Most of us, of course, don’t go that far but, as the author discusses later, we depend on routines. Research has shown that most people need some regular structure in their lives. Society in general also needs routines, because without them transport wouldn’t be on time, schools and offices wouldn’t work, and so on.
But there’s also evidence that routine can be bad for us, and that’s what the second part of the book looks at. Sometimes we need to break with our routines, because doing something new and different increases happiness. Obviously people can get bored if they do the same thing all the time, but there’s more to it than that. Routine also increases the feeling of time moving too quickly. When nothing new is happening, we simply don’t notice the weeks and months passing.
This, it seems, also partly explains why older people tend to forget things. They may think it’s a natural part of getting old, but it’s more likely that when the things we do have become fixed, we often don’t realise we’re doing them. So rather than forgetting what has happened, we actually didn’t notice in the first place.