Have you ever thought “I don’t have enough time”?
“Maybe if I better manage my time and/or be more organized…” you probably thought right after.
Well, that will be great, actually. But there is more.
Timekeeping might be a human creation, but it is curious to notice how it accelerates over time. In other words, what started as a way to keep pace with the seasons and crops, now the clock defines everything we do.
For example, most of us are paid by the hour of work, and not for the actual value our work generates.
Also, while working from home or being a digital nomad is breaking these rules of in-office time-counting control, it can be hard to know when to stop working when we are not in the office.
I can go on with all the time-related problems we have when it comes to work, but they are all symptoms of a bigger issue: short-term thinking.
It is always about the next day, the next project, the next paycheck, the next problem to solve, the next… you got the idea. Think about it: most are always in a hurry, but it is just a race to nowhere -and we kind of learned that in school.
But how does everything you do connect?
Why are you doing what you do?
What do you want to accomplish in the long run?
These questions are not new. For example, in the letters of Seneca, he already questioned how we deal with our time:
“What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily?”
I have to agree with him when, even almost 2 thousand years ago, he wrote:
“The most disgraceful kind of loss [of time], however, is that due to carelessness. (…) [People] allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, – time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.”
Sometimes it can be hard to project oneself in the future with clarity -and that’s okay. It happens to me, too. For me, when it comes to establishing goals and “measuring” them in the long run, I use my two-questions rule.
As Austin Kleon said, focus on practice:
“Establish a daily practice and use it as a way of getting through your days. Sometimes creative work really is just going through the motions. You don’t necessarily need a vision. Stick to your practice, and things will appear.
That’s where I am. I don’t have a grand vision for the future… but I have a practice, and I am curious to see what turns up, and that’s why I get up in the morning.”
On a micro level, I rarely know precisely what to share here in the newsletter — I think about it often throughout the weeks, and I keep a list of potential topics, but I wait for topics to connect with each other, and then work on the “next month topic”. (This month the topic is “time”.)
Time is a precious resource for creativity, so we need to learn how to make the best use of it.
How do you think about the time?
How do you use it in your favor to accomplish your goals?