101 Ways to Make Every Second Count: Time Management Tips and Techniques for More Success With Less Stress (1999)
“All the tasks are in themselves small, but each one has to be carried out at its proper hour, and the day has far more tasks than hours.”
The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Context: It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live. But I was exactly the same when I was still a student. We study and work, don't waste much time, and think we may rightly call ourselves industrious — but we are scarcely conscious of all we could do, all that we might make of our freedom. Then we suddenly receive a call from the hierarchy, we are needed, are given a teaching assignment, a mission, a post, and from then on move up to a higher one, and unexpectedly find ourselves caught in a network of duties that tightens the more we try to move inside it. All the tasks are in themselves small, but each one has to be carried out at its proper hour, and the day has far more tasks than hours. That is well; one would not want it to be different. But if we ever think, between classroom, archives, secretariat, consulting room, meetings, and official journeys — if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost, the freedom for self-chosen tasks, for unlimited, far-flung studies, we may well feel the greatest yearning for those days, and imagine that if we ever had such freedom again we would fully enjoy its pleasures and potentialities.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Hermann Hesse 168
German writer 1877–1962Related quotes
Source: "Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Long Wall Method of Coal-Getting", 1951, p. 6

“1415. Every Dog has its Day; and every Man his Hour.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“She is carrying herself through the day, and it’s not an easy task.”
Source: Every Day
Source: Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926, p. vii (in 1948 edition), as cited in: Moynihan (2009)