A New Perspective On Time

In the business world we are living in, it can seem like there is never enough time. We are 24/7 connected, spinning plates in multiple contexts. As a CEO, pressures from the Board, supply chain, customers, the market, and the need to report growth every quarter, all contribute to a sense of not having enough time.

We might be asking, “How do I live in this hectic world?” “What gets left out?” “And how do I ensure I don’t leave those things out?” If I can get more efficient, I’ll have more time left over to do all the things being asked of me’. Hosts of articles in the media offer clever prioritization techniques to help with this ongoing challenge, reflecting the largely unexamined way we orient to time in the first place.

Our orientation to not having enough time shapes the way we think about our world. By developing an awareness of the way we think about time, and when these thought patterns are no longer running in the background unexamined, we start to see the way our thoughts are adhering to a particular construct of time. This construct has roots in our cultural assessment of time; some cultures view time with more flexibility than others. It is also perpetuated by our individual thought processes about resources in our world, such as time, money and power. If we think these are limited, we’ll think time is limited too.

By examining the way we orient to time, and what has given shape to that both culturally and from our own point of view, we can start to create space for a new possibility. A healthy dose of questioning the ways we prioritize to ‘get things done in a timely way’ is a step towards transcending the mind that created this view of time in the first place.

By training our minds to have more space, flexibility and a wider view, we can become more adaptable and resilient amidst the rapidly spinning plates. We can develop brains that are ready for any future, more able to be with the pressures of the day to day while also being present to the incoming changes that our business-as-usual brains would not have seen coming.