Collin Vs. Blog

Being incessantly short of time (or you imagine yourself to be), caught up in deadlines and delays, you persist in supposing that you are going to get out of it by putting what you have to do in order. You make programs, draw up plans, calendars, new deadlines. On your desk and in your files, how many lists of articles, books, seminars, courses to teach, telephone calls to make. As a matter of fact, you never consult these little slips of paper, given the fact that an anguished conscience has provided you with an excellent memory of all your obligations. But it is irrepressible: you extend the time you lack by the very registration of that lack. Let us call this program compulsion (whose hypomaniacal character one readily divines); states and collectivities, apparently, are not exempt from it: how much time wasted in drawing up programs? And since I anticipate writing an article on it, the very notion of program itself becomes a part of my program compulsion.

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes