About time
BY SEEING TIME THROUGH A FRESH LENS, WE CAN LEARN TO RE- SHAPE OUR DAYS WHILE MAKING ROOM FOR THE THINGS THAT REALLY COUNT
Over the past year, our diaries have been wiped clean of the most familiar markers of everyday time: from work commutes and weekly coffee with friends to birthday parties, haircuts and holidays. As befits time’s curious, paradoxical nature, it’s been both the longest and shortest of time. Now, as workplaces and high streets rumble back to life, we are once again timekeepers of our old, busier lives. But what about the precious evenings we might have carved out to start a hobby, our daily amble around the local park plugged into our favourite podcast or that new project we’ve been planning? How can we work a slower rhythm into our soon-to-be-busier lives and learn to prioritise and practise the things that really make us tick whilst also leaving room for some spontaneity and rest?
MAKING TIME
As writer Penny Wincer explains, getting forensic about how we spend our hours can help us both be more productive and make time for those all-important moments of self-care. As an author, speaker, photographer, newly-qualified book coach (enabling her to mentor potential writers) and single mum to two children, one with special needs, Penny writes from a lived experience. Her self-paced course Creating Time is packed with practical exercises, real advice and reflective questions that can help bring the seeds of a long-awaited creative project to fruition – whether it’s writing, sewing, gardening or simply finding the time to read more books.
“It’s about creating time not just for our physical needs but to find some way of expressing ourselves creatively or just to have some time for solitude,” says Penny, who co-hosts the podcast Not Too Busy to Write with author Ali Millar. “We are so bad at judging time. We pre-emptively say no to things because we think we need a whole evening, but it might be about finding a more imperfect way of doing things.” Penny encourages students to keep a time log journal, noting down daily activities in 30-minute chunks. “Most of us have too many things to do but writing it down can help bring our attention back to what’s really happening and also to remind us that we do have choices,” says Penny. “Time can become our go-to excuse and barrier. Sometimes it’s generally the problem but sometimes not.”
OUT OF OFFICE
One of the many perks of freelancing or remote working can be shaping the day to best suit your deadlines and fridge contents, but then work has a way of seeping into all hours of the day, and home workers can find it just as hard to chisel an hour or two for themselves as those keeping office hours. The ‘Time Dorks’ – aka US-based authors John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp (maketime.blog) – have a few ideas on how to grapple back some time for yourself. Increasingly finding themselves slaves to the ‘always on’ work culture, they wrote Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every
Day (Bantam Press) to help people break free of the ‘Busy Bandwagon’ and what they refer to as the ‘Infinity Pool’ – the endlessly replenishing stream of content that make apps and social media such a pull on our time.
The basic principle of the book is four daily steps. First off, choose something to highlight in your day that you’d really like to do, be it planting your garden or finishing a work presentation. Step two is to employ specific tactics to help you stay focused, such as adjusting your use of technology (more on this over the page). Step three tunes into our exercise, sleep and eating habits, encouraging both quiet time and re-connecting with our friends or family which in turn helps ‘build energy’ and allows us to stay in control. Finally, by jotting down notes at the day’s end we can reflect on which tactics we might like to drop or continue with, and work out, most importantly, what’s bringing us the greatest amount of joy.
When it comes to technology, ‘the Busy Bandwagon’s immediate-reply culture is powerful, and you need faith to overcome it »
As workplaces rumble back to life we are once again timekeepers of our old, busier lives...
Micro rests are as vital for our minds as exercise is for our wellbeing
and change your mindset,’ they write. To help, they encourage scheduled email time, times where you go ‘off grid digitally’ and resisting the need for a morning internet check-in, instead enjoying the ‘golden moment’ of an undistracted brain to help prioritise for the day ahead. Above all, taking control of your inbox requires a mental shift from ‘as fast as possible’ to ‘as slow as you can get away with.’
TIME TO REST
Time plays a pivotal part, too, in Claudia Hammond’s book, The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age (Canongate).
She believes micro-rests – allowing ourselves to spend 15 minutes an afternoon doing an activity that leaves us feeling refreshed – are as vital for our minds as exercise is for our wellbeing.
“We hate it when inactivity is imposed on us, but instead of feeling infuriated and stressed by a ten-minute delay to a train journey, why not rebrand this time as an opportunity to rest for a short while?” says Claudia. “And how about recasting the wait in a long queue as pleasant downtime, a chance to pause, daydream, recharge your batteries?” When we do set aside time for active rest, Claudia explains how we often get wedded to an idea of what we think we should be doing. “You might have been hanging onto an idea, like meditating for ten minutes every day when actually, reading or crafting might be a much better way of relaxing for you.”
As humans, we’re constantly trying to grapple with time. “The week has flown by,” “the hours are dragging,” and “I can’t find the time” are all typical concerns about the time – or lack of it. However, Claudia points out that the elastic nature of time is a two-way process. “Time can warp and play strange tricks on us, but we can deliberately warp time to our own advantage, too,” she says. “Rather than walking the quickest way to the station, say, which you will end up not really remembering, if you walk along a parallel street, or look up high at the tops of the buildings, rather than at eye-level, you will make some new memories. This in turn changes your perception of time because one of the ways we judge how much time has passed is by the number of new memories we made. The more we make, the longer time feels looking back.” Hence the time we spent in lockdown feeling like it flew by when you look back on it.
As the days get longer, it feels like time is on our side. Perhaps by prioritising a regular time to create and pockets for rest, along with a dash of spontaneity, we can learn to dance with time in new, soul nourishing ways. As to how we spend our wild and precious days? Author JRR Tolkien said it best: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”