In this lesson, I want to try to get really, really down to the most fundamental questions of how we see time and relate to our time. Because I think if you can actually bring into awareness what you're unconsciously doing day in, day out when it comes to time, that really is the starting point for overhauling, revolutionizing your approach to time in a way that can be both much more peaceful and relaxing, and also much more productive and effective.
And a really good way to bring that out into the open, I think, is to make a historical comparison and to ask what it would have been like, what time would have felt like to people in the pre-industrial era. Specifically, let's talk about medieval peasants in England in the time before industrialization. Obviously, to be a medieval peasant in England in the time before industrialization was in almost every respect absolutely terrible, right? They just wouldn't have been present in the first place.
And the reason for this is that we, all of us as modern people, think about time as something separate from us, right? We think about there's like there's us and then there's time, and you have a relationship with time, and it's usually a pretty adversarial relationship. You're fighting to try to win the war with time, or you feel that time is hounding you, right? It's at your heels. It's always like me and then time going past, and I've got to try to have the right relationship with it.
This is actually a really strange modern notion, relatively speaking. It dates from the era of industrialization and to some extent a little bit before that. This idea that time is a resource, it's a thing that you've got to try and use well, and then feel bad and beat yourself up if you're not using it properly. For a medieval peasant in England, time was just the medium in which their lives unfolded, right? Time was just the thing that they lived in, like fish in water.
Anthropologists call this way of life task orientation, as opposed to time orientation, because in task orientation your rhythms, the schedule that you follow in the day, is just given by what you have to do, right? You milk the cows when it's time to milk the cows. You harvest the crops when it's harvest time. And if some productivity guru had popped up and said like, okay, the really efficient way to do all the milking is to batch it, right? So do all the milking for the year in three weeks now, and then you don't have to do any more milking, and you can move on to a different task, and you won't suffer from the costs of switching between kinds of tasks — it's all nonsense, obviously. You just have to milk the cows when the cows need milking.
And so that kind of rhythm that was given to people's lives. Then again, terrible lives in many, many, many ways. But it really brings a kind of peace because you're not constantly questioning yourself about like, well, am I going to get through all the things on my list by the end of the day? Am I going to get to the point where I'm in charge of my time and everything's working? If you're involved in small-scale farming in medieval England, you're not going to get to the end of anything. The seasons are going to carry on for many, many, many, many centuries long after you're dead, and they had been going on for many, many centuries before you were born. So you're just playing your part in a way that is actually one that doesn't come with all this psychological anguish. There's actually something very peaceful about it.
Now, we can't go back to the time of medieval peasants, and we definitely wouldn't want to, but I think it's really useful to remember as you undertake an inventory of, you know, how you're using your time and how you're going about setting goals and planning the day and all the concrete things that we're going to be getting into. I think it's really useful to remember that the whole basic way that we think about time, like it doesn't have to be entirely like that. We all do have experiences, I think, of this, the clock stopping. Underneath it all, there is this possibility of having a truly peaceful and present relationship with your time.
I don't think we'll ever know for certain, but a lot of people believe that the first mechanical clocks emerged from monasteries in Europe, right? Where the monks needed ways of coordinating what all the monks in the monastery were doing, so they could get up on time and all pray at the same time. Before they had mechanical clocks, they tried all sorts of systems, like they deputized one monk to stay awake all night and watch the movements of the stars. But then that monk kept falling asleep, so then they did it in pairs, and you had to make sure that at least one of the monks was awake at any one time.
Actually, in various ways we're going to explore, that attempt to maximize your time so obsessively has the opposite effect, right? It leads to you not making the most of the time that you have. But I think that one of my main qualifications for talking about this is that I was even more kind of extremely governed by, lost in this idea of time as something you have to sort of maximize. Any number of emails I could receive, I'd be able to deal with at the same time. Any kind of expectations, obligations that I felt from family, society, anywhere, I'd be able to handle them.
And I remember I was sitting on a park bench in Brooklyn, New York, where we lived at the time, feeling even more anxious than I usually did about the week's work, trying to figure out how I was going to get through all the things I felt that I had to get done by the end of that week.
And I was thinking about like what combination of productivity techniques, you know, time boxing, the Pomodoro technique — people who are into this will know what I'm talking about here — what combination of these techniques I was going to use to become so productive that week that I could actually get to the end of this enormous weight of tasks. And I remember just being suddenly struck by the thought, oh, oh, it's impossible.
I'm actually trying to do a number of things that is just impossible to do in the time that I'm talking about, and just experiencing that moment as such a liberation, because it's really hard to keep beating yourself up for not doing something that you have realized is in fact impossible to do. Right? We don't beat ourselves up for not being able to make two plus two add up to five. It's just not possible. So you don't struggle.
And that moment was really crucial for me because it was from that, that was sort of the beginning of my process of realizing that actually it wasn't serving my attempts to meet my goals, to feel good about my time, to do the things other people wanted me to do. None of this was being served by this notion that if I could just force a bit more discipline, find the killer technique, then finally I would be sort of, I would have infinite capacities when it came to time.
And that was the beginning of realizing that instead what we need to do in this situation is to really, in a clear-eyed way, face up to how limited we are, understand that we've got to choose a handful of things that really drive us and pour our time and attention into those things, and to be willing to let go of an awful lot of the other things that we in theory could do but in fact will never do, and to understand that this is not actually a depressing thought at all. It's a really freeing thought to understand that you don't have to try to be more than a human being can be in order to live a really exciting, accomplished, and meaningful human life.
So when I talk about techniques, one of the productivity techniques that I was very enamored of is this popular one known as the Pomodoro technique, which involves dividing your workday into 25-minute chunks separated by five-minute breaks, and then after you've done four of those, you take a longer break. Another technique that I spent a lot of time working with is known as time boxing.
And this is this very well-known advice in time management to give each hour of the day a job, right? So at the beginning of the day, you try to map out in your calendar what you're going to be doing exactly at every hour of the day. And then when events in the world were at odds with it, I felt like I'd failed in my day. Either that was what happened, or just occasionally it would work really well and I would do exactly what I had decided to do with each hour, and then it would just feel so imprisoning and lifeless and dull, because basically what was I doing with my day? I was just following these instructions that this jerk who happened to be me had set out for me to follow, and there was no creativity left in the day, right? There was no life in it. It was just like, yeah, you have to follow these instructions.
So when it worked, it was no good, and when it didn't work, it was no good. It was another of these techniques that I kept thinking was going to lead to this wonderful utopia of sort of being in control of my time. And you see this promise made again and again in all these books and other educational materials on time management and productivity. It's like, take this system and implement it perfectly, and keep implementing it perfectly, and never falter. And if you fall off the wagon, well, okay, but then you've got to quickly get back on the wagon, and that way you will live more peacefully in time.
But it only takes a moment's reflection to see that, you know, most of these things were invented. I mean, the earliest of them go back to sort of the 1940s, many of them from the 70s and 80s.
I think when it comes down to it, what a lot of us are looking for unconsciously when we decide it's time to like get our lives in order and get organized and sort out our calendars and all the rest of it is basically freedom from time. We want to sort of get out from under our lives, get out from the situation that we're in, and feel like we're the sort of air traffic controllers of our lives, might be one metaphor, right? We're looking down on it. We're directing it. We got all these goals being taken care of, all these obligations being fulfilled.
But you can't get out from your life. You are in your life. We're born just sort of thrown into this river of time. You don't choose what moment in history you're born into. You don't choose the circumstances. You don't choose your parents. You're just there, and you're being borne along the river of time, and one day you'll die. And this is incredibly alarming, but it's also just completely non-negotiable. It's just that's where we are. You have to start from that. So if your approach to trying to find peace of mind involves denying that reality or getting out from it, that's just doomed to fail.
What I think we can hope for, if not freedom from time, and what I think a lot of people in the pre-industrial era might have experienced naturally, is a deep sense of freedom in time, meaning that you acknowledge what the real situation is, you acknowledge where you are, you acknowledge how limited are the things you'll be able to do in the time you have, but you don't experience that as some kind of torment. You experience it as your birthright as a human, and you experience it as an exciting project to try to really make the most of the portion of time and the very limited control over that time that we have been given.
