What are we doing this week?

I see that there is a new time management book called, "Four Thousand Weeks," subtitled time management for mortals. The book’s first sentence, which gets repeated for emphasis on the last page, is: “The average human life span is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” (About 4,000 weeks, on average; thus the title.)

My rough calculation is that I have been on the planet for 3,697 weeks. Man, time flies. I have been idly wondering a bit about my remaining 303 weeks, if I live an average life span.

One depressing reality is that about 82.5 percent of my life is in the rear view mirror. Yikes! 

A more intriguing fact is that I have spent about 40 years teaching, and school years average about 36 weeks per year, so that's 1,440 total weeks teaching.

Another 468 weeks were spent as a student in my K-12 education career.

I spent about 155 weeks in the Air Force.

This counting of the weeks is a weird and not-all-that-helpful way to measure life.

But here is a surprisingly helpful line from the book (taken from the New York Times review -- I haven't read the book): “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

This advice to "neglect the right things" is something I have been advising young high school journalists to consider (in summer critiques examining past work). Once a student embraces the reality that they can't cover everything that happens in a school, they are free to focus on what really matters.

Professional journalists do this all the time. After all, most of what happens in life goes unreported by the media.

The challenge is in finding strategies that can help us do the curating, do the choosing. 

I offer the same basic advice to college essay writers: don't try to "save the world" in one 800-word essay. Trying to cover too much ground always leads to "telling," not showing, and vague, general essays are never persuasive.

The better approach is to do what you can, in some depth, in one essay. There will always be another essay, another issue to address, or another problem to solve.