The Time Trap

I am writing this from Marahua, on the edge of the Abel Tasman National Park. I have come here for some solitude, to walk and to swim. I have brought a couple of books, my journal, and not much else.

This time away by myself is a delightful and rare privilege. The last time I took more than a day away from my family was nearly 3 years ago.  Then, as I drove to the Bay of Plenty, the news of the Christchurch Mosque shootings was announced on the radio. Today, as I travelled to Nelson, the first bombs fell on Kyiv. I take no cosmic significance from this co-incidence of events, beyond the reminder that chaos and suffering is ever-present.

I recently read Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks about time and how we experience it. The messages from that book have been accompanying me as I have walked and have prompted reflection.

For the first 10 or so years of my career, I was obliged to account for my working day in 6-minute increments. This was by far the most stressful part of my job and caused no small amount of anxiety every 2 weeks when timesheets were due.

This way of relating to time, as packages of potential productivity, seeped into my bones. It became very easy for me to experience time as currency to spend, and to spend in a way that yielded a return - whether that was a completed project, a new client, or a holiday destination ticked off a bucket list.

This ethos may be particularly present in professional services but the truth is you do not need to be a lawyer or an accountant to end up viewing your time as a commodity to be leveraged and capitalised.

And it seems 20 years later I am not much wiser. I fell right into that old trap planning this trip...pondering exactly how many relaxing and nourishing experiences I could cram into a 48 period. Googling the best Abel Tasman beaches and strategising precisely what combination of walking pace, water taxis and tides-times would allow me to see as many of them as possible.

What an idiot! Sometimes the only thing to do is have a laugh at yourself and start again.

It is some comfort I suppose to know I am not alone in my pathology. I witness the pressure my client’s experience from the sheer Sisyphean task of ‘getting stuff done’. Leadership has always come with intensity but it feels this has increased lately. I hear more and more leaders express they are feeling less and less in control of their time. That they simply don’t have enough of it. The nagging sense that the time they do have they are perhaps not spending in the ‘right’ way – or at least not in a way that is making them and the people who matter to them happy.

The upheaval of the pandemic seems to have elevated this awareness, at the same time as making the whole thing worse.

More disturbing still is the weary acceptance that this state of affairs is just the way things are now in this complex, fast-paced, hyper-connected world.  In this 'new normal' weekends and holidays are in danger of being relegated to necessary ‘recovery time’ that merely allow us to get back into the arena for another round of productivity generation.

And it's not just in our workplaces. I see children’s lives more heavily scheduled than ever before, focussed on achievement, with shrinking time for freedom, discovery, and, god forbid, boredom.

This morning in the airport I was browsing the bookshop - the self-help section was full of books promising tips on how to maximise your personal effectiveness, master your admin, manage your to-do list. The woman across the aisle from me on the plane was reading one called Life Admin Hacks. Tapping into our time-poor anxiousness has become an industry.

But perhaps all this well-meant advice is not helping very much. Perhaps, even harder than the sense of being time-poor, is the accompanying sense this is only a result of your own personal inefficiencies.

But what if the game is rigged? Maybe it's not your fault. Maybe there really is not enough time to achieve what you have come to believe you need to.

Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks explores this quandary - drawing on scientific research, philosophy, and the wisdom of spiritual traditions to challenge what he sees as our current unhealthy relationship with time.

His book is an antidote to all of those airport self-help books that promise to give you your life back. Burkeman argues these just create the illusion that control of our time is just around the corner – just one more ‘work smarter not harder’ discipline, or one technological innovation, away.

Instead, Burkeman insists that our problem isn’t actually that we don’t have enough time but “that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse’.

In making this case he might not tell you things you don’t already know but he illuminates things in a way that renders many of our current ways of working seem misguided, if not plain absurd.  For example, on email....

“that ingenious twentieth-century invention whereby any random person on the planet can pester you, at any time they like, and at almost no personal cost to themselves, by means of a digital window that sits inches from your nose, or in your pocket, throughout your working day, and often at weekends too. The ‘input side of this arrangement – the number of emails you could, in principle, receive - is essentially infinite. But the ‘output’ side – the number of messages you’ll have time to read properly, reply to or just make a considered decision to delete – is strictly finite. So getting better at processing your email is like getting faster and faster at climbing up an infinitely tall ladder: you will feel more rushed, but no matter how quickly you go, you’ll never reach the top’.

Hard to argue with that.

So why do we do it to ourselves?

Burkeman doesn’t make light of all the reasons many of us find ourselves on a hamster wheel – the reality of paying mortgages, saving for retirement, caring for family etc. But he argues that underneath all the striving there is sometimes a calculation we don’t even know we have made - which is the sacrifice of our current peace of mind for an imagined paradise ahead of us....“treating our present moments merely as a vehicle for in which to travel to a future state of happiness”.

And herein lies the trap.

The future state of happiness we are sacrificing so much for now, is certainly not guaranteed and may well never come to pass. And as Burkeman reminds us, quoting Thomas Wolfe...

“We are the sum of all the moments of our lives, all that is ours is in them”

Burkeman invites us to build a different relationship with time, not as something that we ‘have’ and ‘use’ as a means to a distant end, but in which we face the full reality that we are here on this earth for a terrifyingly brief period of time (the average 4000 weeks of the title). If we are lucky. And that therefore we must make clear-eyed choices about how we inhabit this time that we have been gifted.

He encourages us to embrace the certainty that there will always be too much to do.

You will always leave work unfinished.

You will not succeed in keeping each and every one of your promises.

You will fail to honour many of the commitments you make, however sincere you were in the making of them.

You will not live up to all of your potentialities nor will you ‘experience all that life has to offer’.

You will not achieve all that you set out to achieve – whether this morning nor over the course of your lifetime.

And furthermore, there are no personal disciplines you can adopt that will render any of this untrue for you. There is simply no nirvana at the end of your To-Do list that will be the pay-off for all of the rushing and juggling and frenzy.

This could all be horribly depressing but Burkeman isn’t, as far as I know, a nihilist. He’s not saying that it's all pointless and that you may as well quit your job and watch Netflix all day. Instead, he is reassuring us that if we really grapple with these unpalatable but unavoidable facts then we will be rewarded with the freedom to be present in our lives as they are. And being present in our lives as they are is our only hope of actually living lives that are fulfilling and meaningful.

Four Thousand Weeks is full of humour and wisdom and it has given me much to think about.  I recommend it.

And if you would like a truly mind-expanding exploration of what time really is anyway, accompany it with Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time.

In the meantime take a moment off that hamster wheel. Take a walk. Find some silence. Be still. As Joseph Campbell urged find “a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes you..”

Or as William Blake put it more succinctly “a moment in each day where satan cannot find you”

Breath. Take your time.

image credit: https://www.pourquoidocteur.fr/Articles/Question-d-actu/33848-La-region-cerveau-l-origine-perception-du-temps-identifiee