Your To-Do List Was Written by Panicked Strangers
The vibration starts in the wood of the desk, a low hum that travels up my arm before the sound even registers. It’s the phantom ring, the conditioned reflex of a nervous system trained by a decade of digital urgency. My phone lies face down, but I know. The red exclamation point is already there in my mind’s eye, a tiny digital siren wailing about a fire that, invariably, turns out to be a request to review the font size on slide 25 of a presentation for a meeting that might happen in three weeks.
And I drop everything. We all do.
This isn’t a failure of personal discipline. For years, I was a zealot for time management systems. I drew the Eisenhower Matrix on whiteboards, I color-coded my calendars, I preached the gospel of ‘important vs. urgent’ to anyone who would listen. I honestly believed that the chaos of the modern workday was a personal problem that could be solved with a better app or a fancier journal. I was wrong. Completely, utterly wrong.
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