Arguably, time management is all life is.
—Oliver Burkeman
As a classroom teacher, it is not uncommon for me to overhear some of my students say from time-to-time “How I wish it were Friday!” Other popular variations include “I can’t wait for Spring Break” or “Only (fill-in-the-number) days before summer.” And whenever I hear one of them express this desire for time to go faster, I always reply with the gentle admonishment “You shouldn’t wish your life away”—to which the response is almost always a rolling of the eyes and an “oh, Mr. Brock!”
But once, one of my students actually listened, and the reason I know that she listened was because when she wrote me a letter her senior year, thanking me for being her teacher, she told me that the most important thing she had ever learned from me was the time in 9th grade when I had said to one of her friends not to wish her life away. The words had struck a chord and stuck with her, and she shared that ever since that time, whenever she found herself starting to wish for the day or week or some other timeframe to be over, she would deliberately stop and remind herself not to wish her life away—to remain in the moment and appreciate the “now.”
I share this reminiscence because I have recently read two books in which the concept of time is the central theme—one about how we use it; one about a type of it—and they both brought to mind the memory of Casey because in reading them, I have come to realize that she might be right all those years ago: that the most important lesson I may have ever taught her (or any of my other students) is not to wish life away.
Or to elaborate a little further, to have a healthier understanding of time and its role in our lives than most of us in today’s world do. It starts, according to journalist Oliver Burkeman, with the recognition that our perception of time in modernity is basically broken. As he puts it, prior to modernity:
There was no need to think of time as something abstract and separate from life: you milked the cows when they needed to be milked and harvested crops when it was harvesttime, and anybody who tried to impose an external schedule on any of that—for example, by doing a month’s milking in a single day to get it out of the way, or by trying to make the harvest come sooner—would rightly have been considered a lunatic (p. 20).
However, with the rise of industrialization, people started to conceive of time as a “thing,” a resource that we could each somehow possess and manipulate, and when perceived this way, the reality of time confronts us with the reality of finitude—that the time I “possess” is confined by definition to the brevity of my lifespan. The consequent fear, Burkeman argues, causes:
Most of us [to] invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves…The details differ from person to person, but the kernel is the same. We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at (p. 29; original emphasis).
In fact, that “extreme brevity” is the source of the title for Burkeman’s book. “Four Thousand Weeks” is roughly the amount of time an individual living to 80 has, and since a little over 1300 of those weeks will be spent sleeping (a biological fact I’m not sure even Burkeman has factored into his thinking), the amount of time for doing anything in this world is brief indeed! What all this means for the practicalities of life is worth quoting Burkeman extensively because he puts it so eloquently. For starters, it means owning that in a very real way, each of us is our time, that “that’s how completely our limited times defines us…[It] isn’t just one among various things we have to cope with; rather, it’s the thing that defines us as humans, before we start coping with anything at all” (p. 59). And since we are our time, “every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent time, but didn’t” (p. 33).
Furthermore, “since hard choices are unavoidable [when making such decisions], what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default” (p. 32). Thus, properly grasping the finitude of our choices “means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the ‘fear of missing out,’ because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed” (p. 33), and that includes having to say “no” to doing things that you do, in fact, want to do. As essayist, Katherine May, puts it: “the problem with ‘everything’ is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity with all the meaning sheared away” (p. 19).
Here’s where the educator in me kicks in: not a single one of us can do it all—including most especially even all the things we find actual value in doing—and yet this is not a message we proactively teach our children. Indeed, in the college prep world where I work, we frankly teach students the exact opposite. We encourage every student to take the most rigorous course load while playing a varsity sport, while engaging in community service, while running six clubs, while maintaining a YouTube channel while…. You get the picture. It’s all about the resume for the college application process, and we wonder why so many of our students struggle with anxiety, depression, and burn-out.
Now, I understand and appreciate that we don’t want to place too many limits on our children’s exploration of the world too soon, to close too many doors on opportunities for future livelihoods before they even grasp such livelihoods exist. But what Burkeman challenges me to challenge my fellow educators is that helping students learn to make deliberate choices between all the things that they want to do—to confront at least some of their finitude—is to help prepare them for the realities of adulthood which they will experience soon enough and to provide space for better health. The message “you can be anything you want to be” is not only a lie; it can be mentally and physical dangerous as an individual drives themselves to try. We need to stop teaching it and teach instead “you will have chances to be a variety of things in this world, and we want to help you begin to decide which of these choices you might finally invest yourself in to spend your limited time.”
Of course, the “be anything” myth is not the only delusion our modern misunderstanding of time generates. According to Burkeman, there is a second delusion we have today that is also the result of this misunderstanding of time as some kind of “thing” we can possess, and that is that we can somehow manage and control the future. As he points out, the future simply doesn’t exist. We can’t somehow step outside of time to manipulate it; hence, all we have is the immediate present as we are experiencing it. We can, of course, make plans for, say, the next three hours of our experience. But “even if you do end up getting the full three hours, precisely in line with your expectations, you won’t know this for sure until the point at which those hours have passed into history. You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it’s already turned into the past” (pp. 117-118). Simply put, “you can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one” (p. 119; original emphasis), and therefore, “it’s not merely a matter of spending each day ‘as if’ it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be. I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future” (p. 61).
Of course, it is obviously not possible to function without making some plans about a possible future. If I want to eat dinner later this evening, I must generate a grocery list and then execute it. But as Burkeman reminds us:
The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply (p. 123).
Again, the educator in me kicks in, and I feel the tension in Burkeman’s words. On the one hand, planning and goal setting are critical skills we must teach our children to do; on the other hand, I have seen students become so invested in a particular plan (e.g. gaining admission to a certain college or university) that when the future fails to comply, they experience crushing emotional devastation. The fundamental truth—as a wrote more about in my Letter to the Class of 2022—is that the corollary to “the future is under no obligation to comply” is that “life is just messy.” Resilience is as critical a skill as planning, and therefore, as I argue in more detail in Chapter 6, we must as educators deliberately provide chances for our students to have their plans fail in our presence, where we can provide the immediate support and care to teach them how to cope. Small scale failures of the future’s compliance can nurture successfully handling the devastating failures of its compliance.
Which leads me back to my own immediate “now” and another reflection that Burkeman’s ideas about time trigger in me: if all you have is now, then there is no ultimate “here”—no final destination—to arrive at someday. Yet how often is our message in education (and parenting) one of arrival? Get the necessary grades in high school so that you can get into a good college…go to that college so that you can get a high paying job…climb the stages of your job to create a career…use your career to have and support a family…play games of mental stimulation with your toddler to get them into the right pre-school…. It seems that a dominant lesson we teach in our society is that your life will have meaning…eventually.
However, this “obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death…and that therefore you had better stop postponing the ‘real meaning’ of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now” (pp. 135-136). Now granted, Burkeman’s words are intended primarily for an adult audience, and the realities of human development require a structured timeline and planning to achieve functional adulting. But I have watched 8-year-olds in Meeting for Worship at my Quaker School sit still in mindful silence for thirty minutes, and the pedagogical approach I present in Chapters Four and Five can cause students to be fully invested in the learning moment. So it is possible to stop postponing real meaning into the future in educational settings and enable students to be in their “now.”
But when we do that, we need to keep in mind that what everyone is paying attention to in that “now” is that “now”—your perception defines it—and in today’s “attention economy,” those of us in the classroom are finding ourselves fighting what often feels like a losing battle for our students’ attention.
However, I will leave that battle for another time (witticism intended), and until then, I hope you keep successfully finding your own real meaning in your own “now.”
Author’s Note: “The Clock Is Always Ticking…” is the first in my series about time and education. Be sure to look for “Managing ‘Now’,” “A Time for Every Purpose,” and “A Modestly Meaningful Life.”
References
Burkeman, O. (2021) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
May, K. (2020) Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. New York: Riverhead Books.
Light a Candle 