Moving From Time Management to Timelessness
Letting go of the clock and sitting still for a breath or two
I’ve read a dozen books or so about time management. For me they’re all useless.
Conventional time management treats time as something to quantify. The recommended techniques are all about “getting the numbers right”:
Track your current use of time.
List your current activities and determine how many hours you spend on each of them.
Assign priority to your activities.
Devote more hours to the urgent and important tasks.
This is well-meaning advice that completely misses the point.
When it comes to making peace with time, what I want is not another strategy for setting goals, working hard, and counting minutes. What I want is about qualities that cannot be quantified:
Spaciousness in my life—a conviction that I have time to spare, more than enough for what’s truly important.
Long stretches where I cease to worry about time or even be conscious of it.
A growing conviction that my basic sense of fulfillment is safe and secure—not dependent on achieving or failing to achieve any goal whatsoever.
What I really want is a new experience of time — a state of mind in which time slows down or even disappears.
There’s a name for this — meditation.
Try this: Sit still, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing. See if you can maintain that focus for five full breaths. This might take one minute.
When I do this, I get a visceral sense of time opening up. I am amazed by the true length of a single minute. Those 60 seconds — which usually pass at lightning speed — now slow way down. That minute flattens out, stretches out, and expands into timelessness.
Suddenly time is no longer a problem. And the kicker is that I didn’t “manage” time. I just re-experienced it in a way that’s available right now, always.
What about living in the material world, planning, and actually getting stuff done? This is a separate matter. What works for me is keeping a calendar and three lists that I update weekly:
All the open loops in my life right now — unsolved problems, incomplete projects, unfinished tasks, and anything else that creates friction in my life.
The loops can be closed by taking a single action (an observable behavior). I include these on an actions list.
The loops can only be closed by taking more than one action. I list the outcome that I want for each of these open loops and include these outcomes on a projects list.
These ideas come from the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity by David Allen (beautifully summarized by Josh Kaufman).
Above all, I rigorously reduce these lists to essentials — the items that link directly to my core values. Everything else gets deleted. The less I do, the less I worry about how much time any activity takes. That’s real freedom.
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You hit the nail on the head: Time “management” becomes a never ending battle. The to-do list is always longer than the time available. That’s the nature of our hustle culture. Yet I can change my relationship with time by being present, which leads to feeling a sense of spaciousness and abundance 🧡