Finding "More Time"

I really struggled with what to call this blog post. It started out as a funny story about my wrestling match between productivity and “puttering”, about how I love a to do list, but also how important unstructured time is for my overall productivity. I tried to talk about time management as something that you could both wander and way-find through (you’ll be hearing more about my love affair with the wandering and wayfinding metaphor in a week or two). I tried to talk about Jenny O’Dell’s amazing book How to do Nothing and her argument that we can and should opt out of the “attention economy”.

But all of that kept pointing me back to a larger, more metaphysical conversation about our relationship to time.

In some ways, time is an illusion, a construct that we created. Granted, our time keeping systems are based on the physical realities of our planet rotating on its axis while it makes laps around the sun. Voila! Days and nights, seasons and years. You can’t argue that that is an illusion.

But we put a whole bunch more baggage on that basic reality. We ration our time, assign it value, put expectations on it. We declare somethings a waste of time, and some things time well spent. We decide how much time something should take. We race against time. We live on borrowed time.

In her nonfiction book Animal Vegetable Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver recounts a story of driving home from college and finding an alternate route that saved about 37-minutes on the journey. She proudly tells all of her relatives about her discovery, bragging about how much time she saved. Her grandfather slyly asks her, “Thirty-seven, huh? And here you just used up fifteen of them telling all about it. What’s your plan for the other twenty-two?”  That sure stops the young Kingsolver in her tracks. I read that book about a decade ago, but Grandpa Kingsolver’s question still stops me in my tracks too—you saved some time, huh? So that…what?” Here’s how we say that in coaching terms: what values does your efficiency and productivity affirm?

Ancient Greek has two different words for time—chronos and kairos—from which we derive two different ways of talking about time. Chronos (as you might surmise) is the root of chronology, and refers to chronological, sequential time. This is a way of speaking about time in quantitative terms. Kairos describes time in qualitative terms. It refers to the timeliness of an opportunity, as in an “opportune moment”. It is where we get the notion of something happening at the “right time” or the “appropriate time.” Kairos depends on context, and it that way, it is also subjective. What is kairos for you, might not be for me.

More time, so that…what? When I quantify my time, what happens to the quality of that time?

Maybe you’ve seen this quote in your Pinterest feed as well—“The trouble is, you think you have time.” It’s always attributed to Buddha, but Buddha didn’t actually say that. It’s a quote from Jack Kornfield’s Buddha’s Little Instruction Book, which is Jack’s interpretation of Buddhist teachings. Buddha did teach a certain “seize the day” mentality, which I can get behind in some contexts.

But when I see the Buddha/Not-Buddha quote in my feed, it reminds me of a heart-wrenching moment from one of my favorite plays, Constellations.  The structure of the play, by Nick Payne, explores multiverse theory—the idea that (in my very unscientific terms) there are an infinite number of universes in which all the possibilities for everything are playing out all the time. The protagonist is a physicist, and she has a terminal brain tumor. In one of the possible scenarios the play explores, she is considering assisted suicide, and her partner begs her to reconsider, to spend more of what precious time remains with him, so that they can have more time together. The brain tumor has limited her ability to speak, and so she chooses her words carefully and speaks them very slowly—“you will always have all our time. There is no more or less of it.”

More time, so that…what? What am I paying (or sacrificing) so as to have “more time”?

I won’t lie to you, and tell you that the intellectual activity of pondering the nature and essence of time helps me manage my calendar better. Or maybe it does, but I couldn’t tell you how to do it too. But a good antidote to the grip of chronos and the productivity monster is to pause, take just a bit of time, to ask yourself, “More time, so that…what?”