You don't have a time problem

Because the thing you're actually stewarding isn't time

———

There are few people on the planet as interested in time as I am.

While it likely began as a desire for more control, or relief - a full-send subscription to productivity thinking as a cure to many of my life’s ills - it’s grown to be something much deeper.

Because if you invest enough energy in thinking about time, you begin to recognize that time represents the potential of life itself. Though I’ll admit up front, I’ve come to think the phrase “time management” often points us at the wrong thing entirely.

Time is the canvas your whole life is painted on. It’s the very medium of your life.

As such, it surprises me how little we invest in the stewardship of our time. Of course, there are many competing problems and opportunities we each face daily, so it’s natural that something abstract that never draws attention to itself wouldn’t necessarily become a core focal point.

I think this costs us more than we realize.

Everything we want to cultivate, cull, or make real requires intentional stewardship of time.

• Do you want to advance your career? It’s going to require intentional stewardship of time.

• Do you want to cultivate a thriving relationship? It’s going to require intentional stewardship of time.

• Do you want a healthier mind, body, or spirit? It’s going to require intentional stewardship of time.

———

Time is unlike other resources we possess.

Once a moment passes, it belongs to history. We can earn more money over time. We can develop new skills over time. We can rebuild influence over time. But we never get another Tuesday afternoon. Every meaningful thing in life is ultimately made possible through time.

Think of a problem you’re currently facing and ask yourself honestly.

Is there really a way to meaningful progress in this area without an investment of time?

I don’t mean to overstate the point, because clearly progress is not just about time.

• A thriving career requires wise decisions, the support of others, and the cultivation of one’s character.

• A committed relationship requires effective communication, trust, and the slow work of aligning two separate lives into a shared life together.

• A healthy body (whether that be emotionally, physically, or spiritually) requires intentionality around what you consume and the practices you inhabit.

But can any of these things be realized without investment and stewardship of time?

In a productivity-laden culture, time is often aligned narrowly through a utility-based frame, a priority only for those who want to achieve or drive particular outcomes, often within work or vocational contexts.

As a result of our modern celebration of productivity, there are two distinct camps that have emerged. While both operate on a spectrum, there is a real pattern - those who move wholesale towards productivity as a way of life, and those who consciously or unconsciously rebel against this way of life.

Group 1 - Those who have adopted a machine way of thinking about their time, where life becomes a Tetris game and the goal is to become something akin to the most efficient machine possible.

Group 2 - Those who, in reaction to the massively accelerated (and often misaligned) machine-like lifestyle, default to rejecting time intentionality altogether. Out of fear of being consumed by the machine, they opt for a reactionary relationship to time and life itself.

I’d love if everyone could return to an understanding that our lives, companies, and cultures are a direct result of how we steward our time individually and collectively.

———

Despite everything shared above, I hate the concept of time management.

It’s not that time management best practices aren’t helpful. They often are.

It’s just that time management, as a way of understanding the task at hand, misleads us and leaves the real opportunity off the table.

For many years I’ve worked with individuals who are interested in shifting their relationship to time. They all have different starting points and specific pain points, because every person resides within a different context, and every person is unique.

What I’ve found through this work is that the real lock is not so much mechanics, but rather a deeper understanding of the problem they are facing.

And that problem is not so much time management as it is attention management.

On the surface these seem like the same thing - but they are quite different, and when someone shifts their focus from time to attention, a number of things tend to happen.

• The way they approach their current tools for time changes

• The way they show up in the workplace changes

• The way they show up in their relationships and everyday life changes

———

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Imagine two people spend an hour at the playground with their children.

• One person is on their phone checking email and getting updates on the news.

• The other person simply attends to what is there at the playground.

On a calendar, this is the exact same reality. If both were asked what they did for the last hour, they’d both be able to give the same answer.

But these two individuals had very different experiences and outcomes from that hour.

Or take an example from corporate America.

Three people are in a meeting.

• One is fully present and engaged in what is taking place in the room.

• Another has 50% of their attention on the meeting’s content, and 50% on Jared, who notoriously brings his lunch to meetings and chews obnoxiously. They can’t believe Jared can’t read the room. They wonder why Jared cares so little about his peers.

• A third is overwhelmed. They don’t even think they should be in the meeting. They check in from time to time, so they don’t seem disengaged if called upon, but mostly they’re in their heads thinking about all the things that are going to fall apart if they don’t get it all done. They really need a promotion. They try to get a little work done on their laptop while not seeming like they are trying to get a little work done on their laptop.

Again - same hour, but the experiences and outcomes are different.

What I see working with individuals in and around their time is that often the greatest gains come by not settling for simply trying to manage time, but rather shifting to stewarding their attention on an ongoing basis. Day by day, moment by moment.

Because what is our use of time, really?

It’s nothing more than our use of attention.

A Calendar

Commitments to self (and often others), made in advance, of where your attention will go and when.

Time Blocking

A committed boundary around your attention for a stretch of time.

Task Batching/Deep Work

A committed boundary around a single cognitive mode of attention. Deep focus for creative/strategic work, batched focus for procedural work.

Project Planning

An intentional sequencing of the order of what needs to be attended to in what order by whom.

To-Do List

A running record of where you’ve decided your attention should go next.

None of these actually manages time. Time doesn’t need managing; in fact, it can’t be managed as such. The clock keeps ticking, regardless of what we do.

We don’t manage time, really. We manage our attention.

———

This is more than wordplay or semantics.

Time is a simple quantity; an hour is an hour.

Time is objective. Attention is subjective.

Attention isn’t a binary switch that’s either on or off. You know this from your own experience. Certainly, you have experienced the difference of being with a person who is giving you part of their attention vs someone who is giving you their full attention.

Attention can be divided, scattered, or half-present. Focus, the thing many identify as their core need for their time, is the best shared naming we have for what we all know. That outcomes are driven by what we attend to.

Undivided attention is the true priority.

Unfortunately, most of the time, our attention is divided, especially in modern environments that seem increasingly designed to fracture it.

And the cost of divided attention is not minor. The research here is well documented.

After a single interruption, it takes the average knowledge worker over twenty minutes to fully return to the task they were doing. Meanwhile, most of us switch tasks every few minutes, which means many people never actually reach full attention at all before the next interruption resets them. Every switch leaves a residue: part of your mind stays behind on the last thing, even as you move to the next. By mid-afternoon, your thinking is duller, and no single switch ever felt like the culprit.

And the effects within relationships and life itself are even more sobering. How much of our lives are we truly not present to because our attention is elsewhere? It need not be a phone, social media, or the news. These are easy villains to name and point a finger at. But for many of us, the greatest thieves of our attention will never be seen by others. Much of our attention is spent, daily, on inner dialogues with fear, things outside our control, or ruminations about the past or future.

Life occurs in the present, but much of our attention is often elsewhere. In abstractions from what actually is.

There have been seasons of my own life where I was radically busy, but I wouldn’t argue I was radically effective. I was moving at a speed where my attention never truly settled on anything.

If you’ve ever ended the day and had the sense “I know I did a lot of things, but can’t tell any signs of visible progress” - it’s likely because all day you were traveling an inch wide vs a mile deep with your attention. You were everywhere except present to the task in front of you.

What can be done about this?

I’m a big believer that if you want to grow in any domain - study those who have already figured it out. I created the Monk Manual largely because I saw within monk life a sort of intelligently designed system for attention.

But you need not be a monk to steward your attention more intentionally.

There are many people already living in the world who have found a better way. The exact form of this shifts from person to person, circumstance to circumstance. But there are a few underlying principles that are baseline necessities for stewarding one’s attention.

Every person I’ve ever met, who is truly stewarding their attention exemplifies the following:

• The Ability to Say No: They are deliberate about what they say yes and no to. Sometimes it really is as simple as too many things demanding your attention. If you have 100 units of attention in a given day, week, or month, and you have budgeted for 300 units, no Herculean effort will allow you to balance that budget. When you overcommit, you’ve set yourself up to fail before you even start.

• Intentionally Designed Rhythms: They have systems for bounding their time and ensuring, in advance, that their attention will attend to what is truly most important. A bad system (or no system at all) will beat a good person every time. No one has enough discipline to strong-arm themselves into ongoing focus on what is truly most important without supportive structures. Our brains are quite bad at staying true to our deeper intentions in real time. We seek novelty as well as the resolution of anxiety. It’s simply too easy to follow the current of anxiety or excitement if we don’t anchor ourselves to an intelligently designed rhythm we commit to. When we attempt to do it alone without such a structure, we often end up in shame cycles, wondering why we keep failing and never make the progress we had hoped to make.

• Ruthless Pursuit of Mental Quiet: They actively seek to minimize the inner and outer noise. Our brains are incredible things. But our brains can only handle so much. As such, we need to protect ourselves from unnecessary noise and minimize the number of mental burners we have on at any given time. Practically, this means fewer priorities. It also means closing loops. Sometimes it means suboptimizing one thing, so the greater thing can be optimized. Remove the noise internally, and reduce the amount of external noise as much as you can - and you’ll be amazed at how much easier decisions are made, and how much creativity is unlocked. Cultivating quiet - external and internal - is one of the most pragmatic moves we can make in life.

The Golden Rule here is to be shrewd about what you give your attention to, and then when you give it, give it fully.

In a world seemingly engineered to fracture our attention, this has become one of the rarest and most valuable capacities a person can have. AI isn’t reducing this need; it’s increasing it.

The sheer utility of stewarding one’s attention for work outcomes may be convincing enough.

But if not, I’ll offer the real value of this approach to life.

When we learn to truly focus on what is in front of us, we get to actually experience and participate in the one life that is ours. We don’t have to look back one day and say - well, I suppose I missed it.

A meal you tasted. A conversation you were actually inside of. A child you saw, instead of half-saw over the top of your screen.

Life, not in abstraction, but in reality.

Life is simply richer when you are present to what is in front of you.

We don’t have time problems because time isn’t what we’re actually stewarding. We’re stewarding attention. And the good news is that attention, unlike time, is something we have a tremendous amount of agency around.

MAKE IT REAL:

This week, pick one thing and give it your undivided attention. Set aside an amount of time, show up, and be present fully to what you’ve committed to. This could be a relationship, a project, or even time set aside with yourself. Pay attention to your experience.

Spend 5-minutes and write down how it felt, as well as what the outcome was.