I spent the vast majority of my life in a fraught relationship with time.
It usually felt like something I was railing against. The not enoughness of it. The quickness of its passing. The refusal to bend to my very strong will.
I always found a way to explain this contentious relationship between myself and time as being caused by things outside of myself – things that indeed made good sense. Growing up, it was the myriad demands of being a high-achieving kid who wanted to excel in every class and extra-curricular. The same for college, and eventually graduate school, followed by the eager over-functioning of building an early career.
And then came motherhood, which will gladly serve you too much to do in too little time, particularly in a culture wielding astronomical demands of parenting. Like for most other moms I know, the morning alarm served like a shotgun at the start of a race, launching me into a day that, from the moment it began, was telling me I was behind.
The time pressure of motherhood – at least the motherhood embedded in capitalism and where the village has vanished – is unrelenting. We’re all too familiar with the adrenaline-fueled dash to get kids and selves out the door, the pressure to do paid work as hard and as long as possible, the next adrenaline-fueled dash for dinner and homework and activities and predictable emotional meltdowns, and the final dissatisfied and exhausted collapse at end of it all.
The time that one “gets” as a mother for even the administrative tasks of life, much less the cup-filling ones, comes in tiny shreds – the time confetti I’ve talked about before. We’re sold the idea that there is indeed enough time if we could just be efficient, but that so-called enough time is sprinkled in pieces between a thousand other tasks. As we try to stitch together some semblance of a meaningful personal activity or just a few moments to breathe, we find ourselves feeling helpless and resentful.
Or at least I did. And because I wasn’t going to blame the kids for the way this all felt, and because I was already constantly frustrated with society, the concept of time itself seemed a reasonable place to direct my fury. Why couldn’t there just be more of it? Why did it never feel like mine?
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After decades of being engaged in the endless tug-of-war with time – a game I would obviously always lose, nevermind the hubris of thinking it could be otherwise – I decided I needed to take a different approach.
Before I’d quite gotten to that other approach, though, I’d amassed quite a library of articles and books and accounts that had promised to solve my time woes. It took me too long to notice that the vast majority were written by white men married to women and that doing more in less time was not actually making me any less stressed, and certainly no happier.
As I started to engage in other personal work using frameworks of self-compassion, it dawned on me that in the same way I couldn’t expect my body or my mind to respond well to derision, neither was my relationship to time going to change by brute force.
Having started a practice of journaling that was mostly about writing down questions I needed help answering, one night I found myself scribbling, “How can I create a life that allows me to go at a human pace?” And then, “How can I find peace, acceptance, and partnership with time?”
I set out to answer these for myself, both through self-reflection and meditative practice and by turning to the science. A lover of both, I decided to mine what I’d learned over the years for what could make me not more productive, but rather more at peace with time – things that would ease this tension and, perhaps, make me feel more effective in the process.
Here are some of the core science-backed and personally-tested principles that I’ve been adopting and some ideas of how we can practice them.
Principle: Time your tasks to your natural rhythms.
I first read the science on circadian timing back when Daniel Pink published When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing in 2018. Despite being riveted by how strongly our mood, attention, and behavior is impacted by the time of day, I didn’t really apply the wisdom.
What Pink explains is that we move through three distinct stages in our daytime hours – a peak, a trough, and a recovery period. Most of us, who he calls Larks, will flow through the stages in that order – as I do – but some of us (about 25%) will experience them in reverse order due to being what he calls Owls. Which you are is considered genetically predisposed and is called your chronotype. It generally stays pretty stable, except that teenagers move toward Owl-ishness and older adults get more Lark-y.
Regardless of your chronotype, understanding the three stages helps you consider how you are going to function – and then feel about how you are functioning – at various times of the day.
During the peak, we’re the most focused and “locked in,” as my younger friends would say. Plus, we tend to have the most positive outlook and mood. This is the best time to do analytical work that requires sustained attention, our brightest mood, and most prudent minds.
The trough is when we hit that mid-day slump when our mood and energy tend to be lowest. That doesn’t mean we’re incapable, but it does suggest that it’s not the ideal time for the most important parts of our work. The suggestion is to try to complete more administrative tasks during this time – going through email or doing things that feel routine.
And finally, the recovery period is when our mood is starting to pick back up and we are somewhat more focused again, but actually more intuitive and loose than earlier in the day. This makes this a great time to do things requiring insight and creativity – whether that’s related to our work or our personal hobbies.
When I first delved into chronotypes, I didn’t apply the information in a particularly helpful way. I think I just tried harder to beat my own trough, thinking if I gave myself enough important work in the afternoon and fueled it with enough coffee, all would be well. Spoiler alert: that of course doesn’t work.
More recently, I’ve been really thoughtful about what types of tasks I both schedule and expect myself to do well at various times of the day. I don’t always have control, of course, over when things happen, and so sometimes it’s less about the managing of the time and more about keeping this in my awareness so I can continue to build self-compassion. Instead of feeling frustrated with myself that it’s harder for me to work on an analytical project at 2pm, I can remind myself that of course it’s more difficult – my mood is lower not because I suck at this project, but because that’s exactly what I would predict based on my hormone levels. It’s also helped me stop trying to plow through something that’s just not clicking, recognizing that there could be a better time of day for me to approach it with the right brain power.
Another layer of aligning tasks to the right hormonal time is for those who menstruate to think about the impact of your cycle on your mood, perspectives, and cognitive patterns. I talked about this here.
Quick Start to Apply It: Consider the task in your work or life that you find most difficult. Does it happen during the time of day that’s most aligned for your chronotype? If so, can you change it? If you can’t change it, can you bring some understanding to another reason it feels really tricky?
Principle: Context switching is a time, energy, and mood killer.
When we are trying to quickly shift our focus between tasks, or even between applications or situations related to the same core task, we lose an incredible amount of attention. This is one of the things most of us intuitively know, and yet the data is still shocking. Research suggests that it takes us about 23 minutes to regain full focus once we’ve stopped a task. You can imagine when your day is broken into 30- or even 60-minute meetings, a ton of efficiency is lost as compared with being able to dive deep for a longer period of time.
Even more unnerving to me, however, is the impact that this switching has on our mood and energy. When our brains toggle between things, it taxes our working memory in the brain. Part of our brain is trying to hold on to the last thing while another is shifting to the new stimulus. This results in an over-taxing of the systems, leading us to feel depleted and fatigued, not to mention agitated and snappy.
Every parent who is interrupted eleven times in the span of trying to make one grocery list or the employee who is trying to take care of six different incoming requests simultaneously is all too familiar with the escalating rage that happens as our nervous systems try to tell us, “Enough!”
I’ve been more mindful of the impact of context switching and trying to schedule my days with longer blocks of time. I’ve also been working to be more realistic about how long a task might take me and then allotting enough time for it so that I can more easily avoid getting partially done before having to move on to something else.
Quick Start to Apply It: The jig is up on so-called multi-tasking. Given that we can’t actually do more than one thing at a time and our brain instead is just doing rapid-fire context switching, what’s a place where you could experiment with single tasking?
Principle: Time scarcity feels terrible. To relieve it, give away your time.
One of the most hopeful things I’ve learned in this building peace with time journey is the research on what’s called time affluence – the subjective sense that we have enough time. As an aside, I love the terminology here because in so many ways, true “wealth” isn’t about money per se, but what we all hope money will give us – time to do what we care about.
Scientists did four different experiments testing to see what, if anything, could increase time affluence. They evaluated whether wasting time (their words), spending time on one’s self, getting “free” time (suddenly having more time than expected), or giving away time to others would have an effect. They found that the only thing that made people feel like they had more and enough time was spending time on others.
Quick Start to Apply It: It seems counter-intuitive, but sometimes the very best thing we can do when feeling time scarcity is to give some of the time we have away. What is important here is that it is a choice, not a sense of your time being “taken” by someone or something. The researchers found that the time affluence people felt was because they felt a sense of connection with purpose and a sense of self-efficacy.
Principle: Taking breaks isn’t a luxury – far from it.
If you’ve gotten this far in this piece, you won’t be surprised to hear that breaks have historically not come easy for me. Even when people I trusted would assert how good and important they are for you, I couldn’t quite get on board with actually taking them, certain I was that I had some gene that could bypass the effects of natural fatigue and keep going. Part of the challenge was in the hesitancy to curtail the momentum I felt, the great progress I was making.
But when I started to read some of the research on breaks and how they impact how we behave and perform, I began giving them more credence. In one study, researchers reviewed rulings by judges on incarcerated people’s parole applications. Those who were first in the day or immediately after a break had an up to six times greater chance of being paroled compared with those reviewed in the middle or end, while the judges were fatigued. This was startling to me, given the life-altering weight of these decisions, and made me realize that breaks might not just be important for my own sake, but for all those I impact. Similar effects are found in other industries and certainly for students. A Center for Disease Control study showed that kids who had longer recesses earned better grades.
Now, breaks can come in many forms. Some suggest that going full-on in your break and taking a nap is the best way to go, and the data would seem to back this up. There is substantial evidence that naps increase cognitive performance. Emily Oster summarized a lot of the nap research well here if you are interested. Some of the key points included that a 20-40 minute nap might be best, and that around 2pm is the optimal time.
You don’t have to nap, though, to take a break, which I think is an important point for many of us. Even a brief interlude to have something to eat, move your body, and/or get outside can have very significant effects. And the effects are not just on performance, despite our cultural obsession with everything being tied to that. Taking breaks reminds the parts of us that may be oriented toward hustling or over-functioning that we are indeed living creatures and that we need and deserve to rest.
Quick Start to Apply It: How can you incorporate at least two more breaks per day into your typical routine? If it feels hard to do, start with something as miniscule as taking a 90-second breath break before you launch into your next meeting or task. If it makes you “late,” it will only have been 90 seconds. Work towards breaks that include the two key components of moving your body and breathing fresh air.
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I imagine that like all of my relationships, my relationship with time will be one I have to keep working on and tending to over the course of my life. But I can gratefully say that we’ve been building a more accepting and loving one recently. I’m feeling more like we are partners in this life, and I’m no longer constantly trying to bend it to my will.
Don’t get me wrong – I still wish much of the time that there was a bit more of it and I can lose my cool when I feel it’s been “wasted.” But I’ve committed to living at the pace of a human lately, which is slower and more beautiful than I once thought.
