Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and also one of the most influential thinkers
in the history of Western philosophy.
His philosophy is called transcendental idealism, stating that the things we see in the world
are only appearances, that the true nature of things are not knowable to us, but we can
come closer to their true essence through our capacity of reasoning.
He believed that reason is the true source of morality.
Kant contributed immensely to the fields of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics.
He was also an advocate of the idea of global peace, and believed that it can be achieved
by universal democracy and international cooperation.
He perceived time in an unusual way in respect to how he organized his life.
He was born in the 18th century and was raised in a religious family.
His education was very strict and disciplinary.
As a result, his life was characterized by an exceptional discipline.
Kant was a man of stable routine, following every day the same schedule which led to extraordinary
results.
He wrote important books and essays like: “Critique of Pure Reason”, “Metaphysics
of Morals”, “Critique of Judgment”, “Critique of Practical Reason”, “Answering
the Question: What is Enlightenment?”, and “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch”,
all of them still relevant today, and, in spite of his strict schedule, he had a rich
social life.
It seems that his method of managing his time had great results, he was very productive
to the end of his long life, and with that in mind we bring you 7 lessons on time management
we can learn from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
1.
Organize yourself Kant says: “Science is organized knowledge.
Wisdom is organized life.”
Immanuel Kant was a very unusual human being.
He got up every day at 5:00 A.M., having a domestic helper in charge of making sure he
never gets up even half an hour late.
After getting up, Kant would drink one or two cups of weak tea, smoking a pipe of tobacco
and meditating on his life.
Then, his lectures began at 7:00, and they would last until 11:00.
With the lectures finished, he worked again on his writings until lunch.
After lunch, he went out for a walk, then he spent his afternoons with his good friend
Green.
Afterwards, he went home and spent some time working and reading, before going to sleep
again, around 11 P.M.
Kant claimed that a life without a daily routine or structure will drain you mentally, physically,
and emotionally and, therefore, you need to organize your life in the best possible way
for you.
The best way to start organizing your life is to think about your long-term goals and
set some routines which can help you achieve those goals.
Thus it's very important to organize your life according to your long-term goals because
in this way you can prioritize your activities and allocate more time to those activities
that really matter for you in the long run.
Good time management would help you concentrate on the important things and achieve your long-term
goals.
Kant’s goals were to write books that can transform humanity and that is why he spent
his days mostly writing, reading and teaching, as well as getting inputs from like-minded
people of great intellect.
If you do not set up at least some routines, life will just happen to you and you will
end up working for other people’s goals in life.
Routines can really help you achieve your goals and, for that, you need a significant
amount of patience.
The greatest awards are given to people who are persistent in their journey and don’t
give up.
For example, if you set yourself a goal to be a famous violinist in a big orchestra,
you should choose a job that allows you to spend time developing your musical skills,
like being a violin teacher, as well as daily practice, spending time studying the masters
- seeing them in concert if at all possible, and networking with fellow musicians in groups
online as well as in the bar at concerts and industry events like conferences.
All of these may help you get better gigs as a musician or at the very least will help
you improve, and keep improving.
In general, spending time practising your craft and networking will help you achieve
the required skills for your dream job as well as find the right connections to get
it.
As the old saying goes, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
2.
Follow through Kant tells us: “Man must be disciplined,
for he is by nature raw and wild.”
Kant not only organized his life into sets of routines, but he also followed through.
Being raised in a strict and very religious family, with fixed rules for everything, since
he was a child he learned what it meant to have discipline and to do what you intend
to do.
His actions in life followed a severe schedule, it was said that neighbours would set their
clocks by his daily walks.
He was a man of iron discipline.
After recognizing your most important goals and priorities, you need to show up every
day and follow through with your plans.
It is said that half of success in life is showing up, meaning doing what you intend
to do after deciding on your goals.
Although we may never reach his level of discipline, we can all try to incorporate a little bit
of Kantian discipline into our own lives - especially in our professional ones.
For example, if you are working remotely, online, like me you may find it very difficult
to be disciplined.
It is sometimes harder to create and follow a daily schedule when you do not have a boss
to tell you what you have to do.
In this case, you need to fight your urge to procrastinate, and learn how to motivate
yourself to make progress in your work.
To put it more simply; you need to parent yourself.
Imagine that you are a rider on an elephant, the elephant being your raw and wild nature,
who does not like to follow routines.
It is lazy and rebellious.
You need to learn to be gentle and tough at the same time, to be in control.
You have to motivate your elephant to carry you to your desired goal.
The best motivation technique is to reward your elephant every time he does what you
requested of him.
For a more realistic example, when it comes to scheduling your workload in your job to
maximise motivation and minimize procrastination, you can divide your day into different tasks
- from the most difficult, important task at hand to the least important, most trivial,
and start with your most important difficult task.
If you start with completing your most important difficult task, a task that you will most
likely procrastinate on, you go about your day knowing you’ve done it and the rest
of your day will feel a lot easier in comparison.
Your “elephant” will be motivated to work at the beginning of the day because he will
think of what a relaxing evening he can have at the end of it.
Furthermore, as we learned from our imaginary elephant before, you should reward yourself
after finishing each task - it can be reading a chapter of your favourite book, watching
an episode of your favourite TV series, eating a cookie, going for a walk and so on.
In time, you will notice that it gets easier and easier to follow the routines and you
will start to feel more energetic and eager to continue working.
3.
Follow universal principles in your daily activities
To quote Kant: “So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the
whole world.”
Kant believed that we, as rational beings, have the power of will, to choose our actions
according to our life principles and our principles can be deduced through reasoning.
Instead of following our instincts, our emotions like animals do, we should use our ability
as human beings to reason, to decide on what is good to do and what is not, to find our
life principles and then, based on these principles, we can exercise our will to do the right action.
For that, we need to formulate our imperatives - the commands of reason which we should follow
in daily life.
Kant also advises that we should act such that our principles of action can be a law
for the whole world.
In other words, the more universal our principles which guide our lives, the more rational decisions
we will make and the better our lives will be.
Regarding time management: If we want to apply this Kantian advice, we need to manage our
time in such a way that our style of time management can be used as a law for the entire
world.
For example, through reasoning, we can reach the conclusion that doing daily exercise and
eating a lot of fruits and vegetables is very good for our health, similarly through reasoning
we can fight our impulses that make us procrastinate, that make us watch a cat video on youtube
instead of finishing the report.
In our modern world, we spend a lot of unproductive time at work.
Some studies showed that an average employee is productive only 2 hours and 53 minutes
per day.
The rest of the time they are preparing, discussing or feeling anxious about their work, not actually
doing anything.
Add to that time wasted in meetings, chatting with colleagues and on social media.
So next time you have an urge to waste your time doing something you are not supposed
to do, use your reasoning skills and ask yourself - Is this necessary?
What is the maxim of my action?
What if everyone followed this rule?
For example, if you are planning to scroll through social media instead of working on
a report that's due today, then you must follow the rule that everybody should be entitled
to do the same - in this case scrolling through their social media instead of working.
Then you need to reflect if that would lead to a better society…
Obviously, this reasoning will lead you to contradictions in this case.
Moral actions cannot bring about moral contradictions.
In this model, if you are trying to steal something from a shop, the owner of the shop
would have the right to steal something from you too.
Therefore, stealing is not universalizable.
You are not allowed to make an exception for yourself in the Kantian world.
Similarly if you decide to waste your time instead of work, then you should accept the
fact that everyone is allowed to waste their time.
If the entire company that you work for or own can just ‘choose not to work’, it
will eventually go bankrupt.
Realizing that this is not what you want, you need to change your attitude and put more
effort into your work instead of focusing on distractions that will only give you short-term
gratification.
It is important to follow a set of universal laws in everything you do, like doing your
best in your work, because in theory if everybody applied these laws, the world would be a better
place.
4.
Schedule time for developing your skills Kant teaches us: “We are not rich by what
we possess but by what we can do without.”
Kant lived a rather predictable life, he was not that much interested in acquiring possessions.
What he was interested in, was designing a perfect way of life to accomplish his goals
in the realm of philosophy and that is why he had such a strict schedule every day.
He understood that people sometimes fight very hard to acquire wealth, higher social
status, a promotion and so on.
But all these accomplishments can vanish one day, one business decision can lead to a catastrophe,
one email can destroy your entire reputation, your boss can fire you tomorrow, and so on.
As such, it is not wise to build houses of cards, but instead to keep developing your
skills, to keep learning about your field, keeping yourself informed about the news in
the industry.
Instead of working hard on sucking up to your boss and highlighting your colleagues’ mistakes,
just to put yourself in a better light, you should work hard on learning more about the
tools, processes and software you will have to use, about the customers you will need
to approach and so on.
Keep yourself away from the pursuit of promotions, bigger salaries, and bigger social status,
and stay focused on your craft.
Invest an hour a day, every day after work to learn more about your field, to develop
a skill you do not have in order to improve yourself.
Putting more time in your calendar for upgrading yourself can enhance your career a great deal
in the long run.
5.
Make time for the small things In the words of Kant: “Look closely.
The beautiful may be small.”
In spite of his rigid way of living and of his cold, rational way of conducting philosophy,
Kant understood the importance of the small things in life, like talking to friends, walking
in the park, and enjoying social activities, and he made room for all of those in his life.
He also had a great interest in the world of aesthetics, even claiming that our ability
to reason is the reason we can appreciate all the beauty of this world.
Kant believed there are similarities between moral judgement and aesthetic judgement - that
the physical and the moral universe can be unified.
The more we know how to appreciate the beauty of a forest for example, the more we will
be inclined to make the moral decision to take care of the forest, and in this way our
actions will benefit the environment and, thus, the local community.
The admiration for beautiful things inspires a feeling of awe, accompanied sometimes by
a desire to take care of those things and to treasure them.
It is important to allocate time to appreciate the beauty that surrounds us; a sunrise or
sunset, the flowers and trees, the distant landscape, even the architecture - there is
a world of beauty in most cities if we just spent more time looking up, above the shops!
If not every day, then we should try and do this at least a few hours a week.
Take time to visit a museum or gallery.
Contemplating a piece of art or a beautiful corner of nature soothes our souls and brings
out the desire in us to be kinder and more appreciative for having the opportunity to
live on this magnificent planet.
6.
Make time for your other duties As we learn from Kant: “An action, to have
moral worth, must be done from duty.”
Nowadays we often admire people who are genuinely good and do good things because they feel
like doing them.
However, Kant would say that this is not enough.
For him, an action is only morally good if the motivating forces behind the decision
to make that action are also good.
It is not enough to be good at heart and kind to people, you need to have a solid rational
reason for doing what you are doing.
For example, in the case of a waiter at a restaurant, they should not be kind to their
customers just because they feel that way.
They should be kind because it is their duty to be kind with their customers.
If they only do what they feel like doing, imagine how they would behave with the customers
when they have a bad day.
Only doing good things when you feel like doing them is effectively immoral in Kant’s
view.
We need to act following a set of principles of conduct not only in our work life, but
also in our personal life.
We all have to play different roles in life; an employee, a spouse, a friend, or parent.
Therefore, there are many different types of duties, and to keep everything in balance
we need to find time to meet our duties.
Not fulfilling our duties in one area of life can affect the others as well.
For example, most of us understand how important it is to be in contact with our parents or
other relatives, to call them, ask them how they are, if they need something and so on.
But if you get carried away by your work, you are too stressed to call them, or you
just plain forget, it means you only do things when you feel like doing them, and this is
not moral.
If you truly reasoned through the importance of being in contact with your parents, you
would call them no matter how you feel at that moment.
Not managing such duties correctly can lead to guilt and regret down the road, particularly
once your parents are gone.
No matter how important one area of your life is - in this example your work - you need
to find time to fulfill your duties in other areas as well, like family in this case.
7.
Make time for moral self-development In our final quote from Kant for this video,
he says: “Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would
be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.”
Kant was one of the most influential philosophers in the age of Enlightenment, also called the
Age of Reason, and in his work the concept of being a moral human being played an important
role.
He considered that there are 3 main questions we should all ask ourselves: What can I know?
What should I do?
What can I hope for?
He argued that human beings should always try to make progress in the realm of morality,
that universal peace is possible through collaboration and understanding of each other, that the
life of any human being is sacred, that animals must be respected.
Nowadays, due to globalization, finding a common ground for morality across so many
different countries and cultures is a particularly challenging task.
What is considered good in one country can be seen as bad or even offensive in another.
For example, when it comes to approaches to problem solving, the way people contradict
and debate with each other to find the best solution in typical Western cultures, versus
the more traditional, hierarchical structure of many countries in South East Asia.
Both methods are valid, but can clash when brought together.
The only way in which progress can be done in this regard is through continuous dialogue
and honest, open communication.
Finding common ground is difficult, but it is always worth it.
Facing other cultures or other people with very different personalities can raise new
questions in us and they can force us to update our moral code, which makes room for more
appreciation of different ideologies.
To evolve in a moral sense, we need to be receptive to other cultures, to communicate
and debate with other people in order to reach the best solution.
To evolve on a moral level, we need to get informed, perhaps spend some time each week
- an hour or two at least - to learn about other cultures through reading articles and
watching documentaries, or meeting with a friend from another culture, asking them essential
questions to help you understand the way they see the world.
You could also watch debates on YouTube, philosophical discussions on morality and the like.
By learning and debating, you will reach a new understanding of what is moral and what
is not, helping you to truly know yourself and shape the principles you should follow
for a truly happier life.
If you enjoyed this video, please make sure to check out our full philosophies for life
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Thanks so much for watching.