The Tao of Time

"Yes. This can be hard to get hold of. I got mine from a second-hand warehouse. But it did have a big impact on me. It’s a few decades old now. It very deliberately takes a radically different approach to time management, and seeks to apply insights from Taoism to time management. I don’t know how canonical its take on Taoism is, but essentially it speaks to this idea that time is not something you can expect to master and dominate and dictate to, but something you have to work with as an ally rather than as a predator, as another time management guru puts it. The Tao Te Ching , which I’m sure you’re familiar with, is full of all these images—the strong reed is the one that bends in the breeze; the wise man is like water, flowing around the pebbles in his path. That sort of thing–resilience through gracefully yielding to reality. That’s a really important insight to bring to time, I think. Because if you decide to fight time—meaning that you try to cram ever more stuff into the same amount of it, or just speed things up to do them faster than they naturally take—you’re always ultimately going to lose. There’s only one winner in a battle with time, and that’s time. “Time is not something you can expect to master and dominate, but something you have to work with as an ally” This basic approach of bending with time can manifest in lots of different ways. It might mean having plans for how you want the day to go, but holding them loosely and expecting them to change, or seeing them as a navigational aid for decisions in the moment, rather than a strict instruction for the future. I think it could also speak to some of the motivational things we were discussing—moving through reality and accepting things for as they are at different times, including unavoidable interruptions and maybe also your levels of motivation, that you can’t fight in the moment. And I think probably the best way, in the long term, to have the most generative and creative relationship with time is to work with this strange phenomenon, rather than try to control it. You can take this to another level, into Heidegger territory—that it’s not merely that we can’t get on top of time and control it, or even that we have to work with it, but that in fact there isn’t a separation between us and time. Right. We start by acknowledging reality, instead of starting from some fantasy of how you think reality ought to go, and then spending your days trying to force reality into that box. When you put it like that, it’s kind of absurd, but I think we all do it all the time."