Time and Time again..

Time is a constant pre-occupation of mine. I have lots of different relationships with it. Often I seem to be running out of it, not have enough of it, not have sufficient quality of it or, occasionally have too much of the wrong sort of time! Clearly this has some relationship to my age (see Turning 50 blog) but I think is also derived from the external environment. Like many people, it has been a concern of mine as to whether I've used my time effectively or not. However, I think it is rare that we actually reflect on what criteria we use to assess and evaluate effectiveness of time use, which is partly what I want to do here. There have been many films and books about time and, in particular, time travel within the sci-fi canon. Perhaps my earliest connection with it, prior even to the great Back to the Future film trilogy (https://www.backtothefuture.com/), is through Susan Cooper's wonderful book series, The Dark is Rising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Is_Rising_Sequence). Within these books, the forces for good - The Light, personified in the Old Ones, are able to effortlessly travel through The Doors of Time into the past. The phrase that sticks in my mind is that 'the future can affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future'. Whilst this doesn't particularly sit well with other discourses around multi-verses, paradoxes and the rest of the more 'scientific' terms in time travel, I liked it because it seemed to reject that linearity and rigidity of time and also hints at a reversal of the normal view of us humans as being agentic in relation to time. We like to think of ourselves and our lives as being a journey through time, where we are surging forward, whereas thinking of time as something that passes through us might be more illuminating.

However, I think the way in which we commonly think about time in life currently is worth critically examining a bit. Placing it in a work context for a moment, we are wont to conceptualise time as a concrete commodity which can be bought and sold, given and received. It's in our everyday language "Thanks for your time today", "We need to spend more time together", "I've only got an hour for this". This is, re-enforced, in some professions where time is tightly regulated. Lawyers, for example, bill clients in terms of 15 minute slots of time; teaching at my own academic institutions is conceptualised as hours :"What hours am I getting for this?", and surgeons' work is divided into 10 programmed activities a week. Peeling back the layers of this idea a little bit, it seems to me as though some unreflected upon assumptions are being made in each of these cases. Firstly, we are assuming a homogeneity of those units of time in terms of the effort made and the quality of whatever is generated - the fifteen minutes I do on client Xs case is equal in terms of effort and impact to the next fifteen I do after that. Secondly, it assumes we can precisely and accurately measure and record this effort. Thirdly, often in organisations, we feel that as a result of these assumptions, we can attach a cost and financial value to this. However, for me, investing ourselves in these assumptions gives us a false sense of confidence and gives our time a sense of misplaced concreteness. Intuitively, I know that I cannot so easily standardise my discretionary effort in relation to work and broader life. For example, at the moment, I run 5k every other day. However, I know that I have to put far less effort into running within the first 15 mins of the run than in the last 15 mins because I get tired. Similarly, I know that when I'm teaching, reading or writing, I can have what feels to me, either to be a hugely productive hour, a mediocre one where I get something done but feel as though I might have done a bit more/ had a bit more impact and, of course, a poor hour where I largely fail to achieve what I wanted to. The problem is that it can often be difficult to precisely measure and record how effectively I am doing those activities. We are often poor judges of our own performance, it seems to me. That judgment is often pendulum-like in nature - we swing between being hypercritical about how we've used our time to being supremely satisfied with what we've done. I know I do that. Hence commodifying time and standardising units of time, as we do, is hugely challenging.

---

Two further thoughts about time which are pertinent to modern organisational life as well as life more generally. Firstly, in Roman Krznaric's (2020) book, 'The Good Ancestor' https://www.romankrznaric.com/good-ancestor , he makes a strong and passionate case for long term planning and thinking, criticising current prevailing societal and political norms for failing account for the impact of current action on future generations. He argues that human beings have a capacity for long term thinking and invites us, the readers, to consider what we would want our legacy to be for future generations. In doing so, he argues that, when planning or making decisions we should consider what future generations, in 100 or 200 years might want us to do. This is a very different perspective on time to the one we're used to having, as it positions those who've not yet been born as being key stakeholders in the present. The second perspective is the idea of a chronotope. A chronotope is a literary device first put forward by Bahktin, which I understand as a way of locating a conversation or written discourse within time and space. This is often done in writing by using metaphors. I am currently co-writing an article on coaching & chronotopes based on someone else's recent doctoral work in this area. Without going into the substance of the article itself, we argue that common metaphors like journeys, within coaching, are chronotopes within which it is possible to locate coaching conversations. As a result, they tend to play a role, as does organisational context, in influencing how that conversation is constructed and where it leads to. Krznaric understands this very well, it seems to me, when he discusses what he calls 'the tyranny of the clock'. On p40-41 of his book, he describes how clocks became 'instruments of power that could regiment, commodify and accelerate time itself'. This tyrannical view of time I think lies at the root of my own uneasy relationship with it and, as Krznaric argues, stands at odds with other views of time that are more cyclical and less linear in nature, as I introduced above. In his podcast 'How to Wow" https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/chris-evans-how-to-wow/, a common theme that comes up in many of Chris Evan's interviews with various famous and, in different ways, successful people, is theirs and his own view of time. Evans is known for no longer owning a mobile phone and argues that this choice, taken in January 2019, has enabled him to have 'more time' available to do things that he wants to and has meant that he is more 'present' with his family and friends, when he is with them. Perhaps Evans is re-inventing his own relationship with time, moving towards one that is more cyclical than linear in nature. Many of his guests on the podcasts e.g. Dawn French, James Martin, Rich Roll, Emma Thompson, also seem to be expressing their relationship with time and work, differently. They all seem to express a sense of relaxation and report a better relationship with what they choose to do, seemingly rejecting the quick wins that can result from 'selling their time' to the highest bidder and replacing this with time for introspection and identifying from the inside what they truly want to do. For some, like James Martin, this has meant returning to his first love of cooking (rather than managing businesses & restaurants) whilst, for others, like Dawn French, this has meant the identification of a newer passion - in her case, writing novels. For me, this rejection of the tyranny of clock and the consequent desire to be effective and efficient with time, coupled with a desire to leave a positive long term legacy, seems healthy and productive. For me this is set against the dystopian view of time in Ben Elton's novel "Time and Time Again" https://www.waterstones.com/book/time-and-time-again/ben-elton/9780552779999, where, upon the discovery of a way to travel back in time, successive actors from different realities are doomed to repeat trying to change the past and no-one seems able to break the cycle because the scenario resets itself every time some tries and there is no possibility of reflection and change in this context. Hence, the identification of a timespace, to use Bahktin's term, to reflect and engage in introspection seems critical. The chronotope that this more positive perspective brings to mind for me is the sense of being in a place on holiday in the sunshine with yourself for company as you decide how the day will flow through you. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is only by slowing down and not trying so hard that we can have the most impact and legacy for futureholders (Krznaric, 2021). Adopting this long term. reflexive position is the biggest challenge we face as humans.