Living in Time

Anne van Roden, LMFT

I completely relate to my many clients who find living in time utterly unnatural. I always smile when I’m working with a client who realizes that our session is coming to a close and yet they haven’t quite finished the story/art/game/activity that they are in the middle of. They try to speed up in order to finish within the remaining time they have left, frantically trying to cram more into the time allotted than they have. It just feels so wrong not to complete what they are doing, regardless of how much time it takes. I get that. My response is always “don’t you just hate having to live within time?!” I have spent a lifetime trying to do that myself, and the tools I use now to help myself with time are hard-won indeed.

One helpful framework a friend pointed out is that, unlike money (which is so inequitably allocated), every human on the planet has the exact same amount of time to spend everyday.  We all get 24 hours, no more, no less. A helpful experience for me was the moment I was forced to realize that my expectations of how much I can fit into a day are utterly unrealistic. That happened for me when my husband and young son went on a trip without me for the first time. I was so excited about all the wonderful things I was finally going to get to do! Looking back, I have to laugh out loud at the way I truly thought I could fit about 72 hours of activities into my 24 hours each day—a total mismatch of reality and expectations.

The other day I was working with a client who struggles with time management and was trying to figure out how to help her child who has the same struggles. I found myself sharing my closet analogy. Many years ago I had a very, very messy closet. Then I had a “Marie Kondo” moment, stepped back, took inventory of all the items I needed to fit into my closet, and engaged my (very handy) husband to build out exactly the storage structure I needed for my items. It has been so easy to maintain order in my closet ever since. 

I find that structuring my time each week works the same way. When I have a place to put the things I need to do, and I’m willing to discard the things I no longer need that don’t fit into my week, things just flow so much more smoothly and I’m happier with the results. Rather than feeling I “never have enough time,” I feel empowered to prioritize the activities I most want to do.  Of course, for most of us a large portion of our time is taken up by “musts” such as sleeping, food prep and consumption, work or school, chores, etc. Like any budget, it can be discouraging to see how much is taken up by the necessities of life and how little is “disposable income.” These days many people try to get more “disposable time” by sleeping less, but that’s another topic—we ignore Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at our peril!