Extra Time

I had a recent experience of time that got me thinking. Let’s start with the story and then dive into the things that are sitting on my mind.

I had organised a catch up with one of my cousins. She is a really important part of my life and someone whose friendship and connection I really value. We will quite often catch up and get out for a walk and talk, perhaps with a splash of coffee. Our catch ups always involve a lot of deep conversation. This catch up was no exception.

However, this one was special in a different way. We both had space and free time. I think the intention was to get our walk done and get on with the day, but the catch up turned into a morning. We talked about a lot of big things and worked through some current challenges.

It didn’t feel like a morning time-wise.

We needed that time together.

When I open my work calendar I see a lot of one hour appointments (usually meetings). In fact, when I organised the walk I mentioned above it was packaged up in a nice tidy one hour block in my mind.

Followed by another one hour block. And another.

This got me thinking - why is one hour the default way we make use of time? It is because of the nice round numbers on the clock? The defaults in our calendar apps? The way we all do it to each other?

Quick sidestep to one of my favourite authors Oliver Burkeman and his book Four Thousand Weeks. This book, and a lot of Oliver’s writing, really challenges the notion of productivity as endless hamster-wheel chase of something you can never reach. Channeling my inner Burkeman - I can see how we often try to get as much done as we can in each one hour block, and we tend to try and cram as many one hour blocks in as we possibly can. Then these spillover to the next day or the ensuing weeks. One big block party….

But why one hour?

Can we do scheduling in a different way - at least sometimes?

I need a calendar and I heavily depend on it. I definitely couldn’t get all the things I like doing done (my full life). And there would be chaos with others, especially our family! Our share calendar is a rock of keeping the family rhythm rolling.

Getting into the calendar though, I’ve been exploring something a bit different this year and I think it has been working.

I’ve written about dabble time in the past - the idea that you set aside deliberate spaces where you try new things or explore things (hat tip to David Epstein and his book Range). After numerous attempts at this, I realised that I’ve struggled with not having something definitive associated with the time.

What I have changed is:

• Finding a handful of times during my week e.g. a morning from when I wake to breakfast with the family, or an evening after dinner and before bed, then…

• Tagging them with something e.g. music, a project, admin.

I’ve found myself having these little experiences like being engrossed in my new love of re-learning Japanese on Duolingo or rocking out with some music and messing around with DJing. My side projects feel more fun too. Spurts of getting things done.

The main benefit has been that these things have gone from tasks that I’ve been putting on myself (and generally not doing) to a much freer and healthy relationship of “whatever gets done, gets done”. Success is now just spending some time - not how much stuff gets done.

None of these are one hour blocks.

Associated with this is making sure that I don’t allocated every chunk of free time to something. I don’t have to do something every morning, every evening and all weekend. I target a handful of slots for this - and if they don’t happen then its all good.

Which leads back to my story at the top…

My last section talked about stuff that I do. Another important part of this is relationships and connection. This is something we all need to do and my story was another realisation that longer period of time are critical.

Why? If we constrain ourselves to an hour (and both parties have something to go to) then the clock naturally places a limit on how deep you can get into a conversation. More importantly, we may not know how much time we really need to get into the depth that is required at that time.

I appreciate that the second comment is a little meta! We can never know how long we need because our conversations are often journeys of exploration - if we knew then it isn’t truly exploring. However, I think we can work on hunches and good judgement. For example, there are some people we know that we enjoy spending time with (track record) and we can sometimes know that a good conversation topic is brewing (a need).

So how about allocating this connection time with more flexibility? For my story, this was a result of both of us having flexibility and space on a day off. By chance, we both didn’t have to rush off to somewhere else - I think that could also be planned in hindsight.

While we walked and talked, my cousin told me about a recent experience when she caught up with her two closest friends for a whole afternoon. They meandered around and did stuff, laughed a lot, created memories and at some point in the evening called time on the day. It sounded a lot like flexible time for connection.

I’m not saying that the one hour blocks are done, even for seeing other people.

What I do hear a lot is that I don’t have the flexibility. We can create flexibility over time. Try blocking some longer periods in your calendar and watch some flexibility come back into your life.

And think about how we use those longer blocks, particularly for connection.

True connection needs time.

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