If you’ve spent any time in the psychology and self improvement sections of any bookstore, you know that Dan Ariely quite literally wrote the book on human irrationality. With bestsellers like Predictably Irrational and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, Ariely is a go-to source for knowledge about why we do what we do, even when doing it just doesn’t make much sense.

Now Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, has turned his attention to another topic that vexes the best of us: time management. He’s part of a team that created a smartphone app called Timeful, which I’d describe as an intuitive self-management tool that goes a few steps beyond typical schedulers and time planning apps. I recently spent some time chatting with Ariely about time management and related topics.

DiSalvo:  Time management — we’re obsessed with it, yet we generally seem really bad at mastering it. Where do you think people often fail in getting it right?

Ariely: I think we are obsessed with time management precisely because we are so bad at it, but the reality is it’s no wonder we are bad at it because it’s a really, really hard thing to do.  Not only is it hard to manage multiple things, but you also have dynamic changes throughout the day in which you have some hours where you are more alert and have high cognitive capacity and some hours where you are more tired. And then things change dynamically like deadlines or additional requests come in, so the prioritization problem is incredibly hard. In fact, I think it’s not humanly possible. So what do we do? We do our best. We say “Ok, what’s the next best thing to do?”

And is technology helping or hurting us in this regard?

Technology is actually making things worse. For example, take a To Do list. I personally have over 729 things on my list in Evernote, and one of those To Dos is to go in and organize all of other things and figure out what I should do and what I should abandon. The problem is that it’s such a big task, it’s probably not going to happen.  The world is rich, there are lots of things we can do, and we have an easier and easier time of putting things on our plate, and searching through all of those things and figuring out what is the next best thing to do is incredibly tough. We do a terrible job at it and the consequences are that we are stressed, unhappy and not as productive as we could be.

Which explains why when I talk to people about how they manage their time, the overriding vibe I get is stress. Figuring out how to make best use of time is stressful, and dwelling on that, it seems to me, can become its own time-consuming monster.  

If you were a farmer and worked from sunrise to sunset, and farming includes very basic things to do with no real questions, life would be very simple. But we live in an incredibly wonderful age with lots of things vying for our time, more than we can handle, and on top of that we aren’t limited to sunrise to sunset. All of this richness, while wonderful, also creates very strong constraints.