Time: Elastic vs. Concrete and How To Manage It To Accomplish The Important Things In Your Biz & Life

We can view time in two distinct ways. 

I have to be at work at 8:00 a.m.  The movie is going to start in 22 minutes.  When we talk about appointments and deadlines, we’re talking about “clock time”.  Clock time is chronological and linear, and we can measure it.  It’s the concrete 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, and 24 hours a day. 

But we also say— I had a great time at the party last night. Or those were good times.  And we also experience time in different ways—it’s the time that crawls by in the late afternoon on a Friday while you’re sitting in your cubicle.  But it’s also the years that my son went from a boy to a teenager.  He used to hold my hand and now he’s in college.  Those years flew by in an instant. This is what we’ll call “real time”.

Real time is cyclical, elastic, and endless. It’s qualitative and can’t be measured. 

When we talk about wanting to cherish the time we have with our kids, we are talking about “real time”.  People and relationships take precedence over the clock.  The time or length of an appointment or meeting is irrelevant in real time.

So what does all this mean for you?  We’d love to live in a world where we live by the mantra “time is a construct” but let’s be realistic.  We need to know how to manage a blend of both clock time and real time because we live in a world with both.  We have deadlines, appointments, and meetings.  And yet we want to cherish, focus, and spend time on the people and things that matter most to us, regardless of the number of minutes on the clock.

So here’s the mindset shift.  Real time is mental.  It exists in those 6 inches between your ears.  Now is the time to remove any self-imposed limitation you have around “not having enough time”.  

Thinking about your time and how you “don’t have the time” to do certain things, requires a mindset shift. 

Chris Bailey, a productivity expert says that when we talk about “having time “ for something, we’re really saying that we’re devoting our energy and attention to that thing. (p.91).  

Laura Vanderkam, another productivity and time management expert, says “It is about changing your mindset and recognizing that much of what fills our time is a choice.” (p. 168)*

Much of what fills our time is a choice.  That’s pretty powerful.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could find a way to fill our time with what’s meaningful instead of always just responding and reacting to whatever is coming at us?

Think of time as being elastic.  It expands and contracts to accommodate whatever we’ve got going on.  We have time for the things we make time for.  Ever had your ice maker line crack and flood your kitchen?  Or your child got sick and had to be picked up from school and taken to the doctor?  On a normal day, you wouldn’t think that you had any extra hours to fit in anything other than your 9-5 and family stuff.  But what happened in those situations?  You shifted your priorities to deal with those unanticipated emergencies.  It wasn’t that you ran out of time and couldn’t do those things.  You just had to shift priorities to accommodate them.  

Time is elastic and it shrinks and expands to accommodate what we’ve got going on. 

How does this change how you view time and the tasks on your to-do list and the important things in your life that tend to go by the wayside?