On Time
The “Passion Planner” was first sucked into the gravitational force field of my striving at an internship in 2016, thanks to a young colleague who reeked of competence. She represented the sort of high-achieving twenty-something I was desperate to become, and she was always toting around her leatherbound daybook. In morning meetings, I’d ogle as she carefully outlined blocks of her day with different-colored markers—the planner neatly compartmentalizing her time into thin, 30-minute rows for maximum efficacy. This is the level of control that real adults exercise, I’d think, before plunging a hand back into my bag of breakfast Cheez-Its.
“Any blank space was a referendum on my commitment level.”
For years thereafter, I reordered this same planner, also carefully outlining blocks of time in lime greens or electric blues to denote everything from workouts to meetings. These bright boxes felt like the only suitable way to contain a schedule that increasingly threatened to seep out of the margins, time an unruly opponent that could be circled, plotted, and highlighted into submission. The sight of sparsely populated pages filled me with dread and a sense that some opportunity had surely escaped. Any blank space was a referendum on my commitment level.¹
I’d have stress dreams about losing the planner in the same way one might dream about losing a wallet or their front teeth, waking up sweaty, fumbling around in the dark to make sure my emotional support book was still resting on the nightstand where I’d left it. Time was something to be filled, stretched, saved, raced. To waste it was the worst offense. “Time is now currency,” E.P. Thompson wrote in his 1967 essay Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. “It is not passed, but spent,” like money.
The dawn of industrial capitalism utterly transformed humans’ perception of time, and as Thompson wrote, it was a moral shift as much as a technological one: Once time was something that could be bought and sold by the hour, it became a commodity, and commodities can be optimized. “The first generation of factory workers were taught by their masters the importance of time; the second generation formed their short-time committees in the ten-hour movement; the third generation struck for overtime or time-and-a-half,” he wrote. “They had accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight back within them. They had learned their lesson, that time is money, only too well.” (I wonder what he’d say about the Slack generation and job descriptions that boldly declare noble principles like “work-life integration” and resisting the urge to “punch out.”)
“Industrialization mapped grids onto the undulating topography of our days.”
Industrialization mapped grids onto the undulating topography of our days, weeks, and years, creating the formerly unimaginable concept of “free time” (that is, time someone else has not already bought and paid for). Not everyone accepted this development without pushback: In France’s July Revolution in 1830, rioting Parisians shot at the clock towers. I, however, am much less daring than your average French protestor—and something about this orderly approach always felt inherently safe to me. Never mind that it’s completely at odds with a humanity that is cyclical, seasonal, and ephemeral.²
Even though it’s been years since I’ve owned a physical planner, the sediment from this period calcified my relationship with time: Once I was done buying the physical planners, I simply digitized the color-coded stacks for my Google Calendar, pleased with this rainbow affirmation of my effectiveness. Every six months, I’d realize I hated my system, maniacally drag and drop the boxes around my screen, squeeze in a few more, and issue notices to the people I worked with about my new schedule; the schedule that would finally allow me to transcend the human realm and become one with the Cloud.
Whenever periodic tweaking, rearranging, and wrestling my capacity into the confines of these two-by-three squares couldn’t make things more sustainable, I blamed a faulty strategy for my failure to accommodate the load. It never occurred to me to ask whether the problem might’ve been the load itself.
More recently, I’ve been preoccupied with time—how we use it, how we perceive it—following a conversation with a friend who just landed a major novel and film deal. “Now that things are taking off,” she told me in a voice note, “it feels more important than ever to protect my space and thinking time.” This struck me immediately as profound. Where I had understood early career traction as proof I needed to make my time (and myself) more efficient, more available to seize every opportunity while people cared what I had to say, she saw this as a trap. Her instinct—to protect, not maximize—implied a self-trust that left me speechless.
“Space is a prerequisite for stillness, and stillness for listening.”
This new framing rendered my approach almost exactly backward. What if the thing I had internalized as proof of high performance was actually a lack of trust, a self-imposed policing of time and effort that implied things would certainly turn to shit if I allowed any breathing room? Giving myself over to the anaesthetic glory of pinballing through a packed day almost always meant abandoning my physical self entirely, something I only noticed when someone asked me how often I held my pee as a proxy for connection to my body’s most basic cues. I realized I was holding my pee while they asked.
The unfortunate thing about meticulously creating this architecture designed to enable constant motion is that you can’t really hear over the sound of the whirring machinery, so it’s easy to become alienated from the “you” that might choose something else. Space is a prerequisite for stillness, and stillness for listening. Rarely did I consult any such “inner voice” for direction in my decisions. Who needs an inner voice when you have a color-coded G Cal barking orders at you every 15 minutes?
But this is the implicit operating logic powering most places where we’ve substituted a paranoid surveillance for human instinct, to the point that we hardly notice it as a discrete presence: You should closely budget every penny, because you cannot be trusted to allocate your resources wisely without intense monitoring and restriction. You should count your caloric intake, because without this supervision, your body cannot be trusted to know how and when to fuel or move itself. From this primordial soup emerges everything from fad diets to agitated, high-octane Black Friday benders. How much of this prescriptive complexity and indecision could be avoided if instead we learned how to access and trust the silenced parts of ourselves that know what we want without cost-benefit analyses or crowdsourcing?
“How much of this prescriptive complexity and indecision could be avoided if instead we learned how to access and trust the silenced parts of ourselves?”
“Temporal” is a word with a double meaning: It means both “relating to time” and something that’s “of the flesh”—something earthly, corporeal, real. When humans adopt the invented logic and language of economics in their individual lives too earnestly (“time is money!”), we become alienated from the sort of intrinsic power that can’t be neatly quantified or even explained; the quiet knowing that says when something feels wrong, or right.
______
¹ “Blank Space” is also the genre-shifting Taylor Swift single that marked her transition from country to pop, but I’ll keep it in my pants.
²I’ll note this is doubly true for women, whose bodies and hormones are literally cyclical, though again, I’ll keep it in my pants!
