Where Did My Time Go? Time Management in Libraries

“Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so” said Ford Prefect, in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (2005). Lunch (and time) flies! However, thinking about time can be heavy. It flies, slips away, passes, heals, and is lost, found, made, wasted, spent, used, counted and killed. Still it continues, and each one of us must figure out what to do with it—an entire dimension. Few would argue that it is important to use time well, but we often take for granted our largely untrained, yet skillful, accomplishment of that goal. Time is important, critical in fact, yet we seldom spend it honing our management talents. If we do decide to take the time, there exists no lack of literature to help. What does that literature tell us? This study will review book literature on time management in libraries and present a time study that is the result of the author’s research on the topic, providing recommendations for future studies.