It is management of priorities, and thus of self.
I told you so, I told you so, I told you so. From the article:
What matters now? (People change in time, so it’s natural that priorities change in time, as well. Make sure you’re not acting on yesteryear’s priorities just because you had them last year.)
What actions can I take today, tomorrow, and this week that most reflect my priorities?
What are the priorities of the people around me who matter? (Your family, friends, boss, coworkers, employees.) Do we have alignment, interdependence, or tension?
What’s on my plate that doesn’t reflect my priorities and what needs to happen to get it off my plate?
With whom can I share my priorities so that I receive the support I need to take action on them?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
A very good article. Thanks for posting that. This explain a lot about our fallacious thinking about time. I’ve never really even understood time anyway, or the way that other people seem to understand it, but I do understand priorities.
How do you think other people seem to understand time?
Fixed quantity of something. Something to be “wasted”
Oh, I see.
I’ve decided my priorities.
True priority: interesting, intellectual and useful job in large organization, urban location with cultural opportunities; extensive, semi-long term, job related overseas travel.
Official priority: research, writing (that is supposed to be the path to the true priority). Comment: this is hard to do in bad circumstances when it is not an end in itself, just a putative means to an end, and when I know it is something I can do — it feels as though there were nothing new in it, and no reason to be doing it, although officially I know the reason, and I would be happily doing the same projects if they were supporting me to live elsewhere.
Actual priorities: a/ diminish self so as to be less of a target for attack from people who are jealous of the fact that I have high expectations of work (this is the TOP priority, the one priority that rules all others); b/ create as pleasant an abode as possible so as to have place to lick wounds; c/ try to be out of town as much as possible.
Very good. Having one priority to rule them all is immensely clarifying.
Some notes I need to return to:
Notice how what I want is to participate in the research atmosphere, be a researcher and writer, and how it’s not the topic I care about, it’s the atmosphere; if I can’t have the atmosphere then I look for one like it, a political action cell, an active art studio, a new graduate or professional degree, anything so that I can be in a research-type atmosphere, not stuck in the deadened rural suburbs alone and so far away from the library hum. Other people aren’t like this, they love their topics more than I do and their atmospheres less.
Notice how, after so many bad experiences in the deadened rural suburbs my top priority is not the things I want, but self-harm undergone on the theory that it will halt total annihilation. Notice also how in theory the official priority will get me to the true priority, but how the TOP priority sabotages that.
It’s not that I didn’t know these things, but the schema is useful. I’ve always noted that it isn’t necessarily true that the official priority will be the path to the true priority, and that trying to tell myself it was true causes great anxiety because I know it is not necessarily. The TOP priority has to be ditched. The official priority has to be treated as something other than it is being: it isn’t working to think of it as a means to get to the true priority, or to try to convince myself that it is the true priority; I should perhaps use it as drug. Before my breakdown, when I was just unhappy at work, I experienced research and writing as this joyful return to reality and creativity, as a chance to be in a conversation with smart and interesting people, and so on. Since my breakdown it’s a mirror of trauma and I just want to get away from it. It is as though it were Cinderella or somebody and I needed to rescue it from an ogre. EUREKA: IT IS THE PART OF ME I AM TRYING TO KILL SO THAT I AM NOT 100% KILLED BY OTHERS. IT IS THE PART OF ME I AM TRYING TO DESTROY IN A CONTROLLED WAY SINCE IF OTHERS KILL ME IT MIGHT BE BY A YET MORE PAINFUL METHOD. It is something I froze to use later, and that is now hard to thaw.
So: how to ditch the TOP priority? Use the official priority against it. Official may be true but it is better than TOP. TOP emerged from Reeducation and before that, when I was located in the official and true priorities, I was better. HMMMM … I have thought of and known all of these things before.
How to make research and writing, all academic work actually, renewing and bright, as they were before? [TOP priority is a trauma reaction and also, and it was these traumas that turned academic work in to drudgery and into a space of fear; I have to rescue it. Also: IS the academic life REALLY ONLY AN OFFICIAL PRIORITY, OR IS IT THE TRUE PRIORITY AND I AM AFRAID TO SAY THAT? I think that is true: I don’t want to say it because I also want to live in a place I can be happy.]
(What do I really prioritize? Struggling with myself over the question of whether I should suppress myself or not. Struggling with a superego that may not even be my own. As a result of that I have to fit the rest of life around this huge struggle, that occupies most of the room. All of real life must fit somehow in the corners and that is why it is so difficult to find time-space for it all–especially when you have as much real life as I do.)