Time As Gift As Well As Challenge

We all know time is a gift. Yet almost everyday, my own clients and colleagues -- and I'm sure many of yours -- comment on time as an enemy and a challenge.

How often do we all hear (or say!):

•  there's never enough time
•  there's time but I question how well I use it
•  he wastes my time
•  next week (or year) I'm SURE I'll have more time

This article explores different approaches to time and what time-relationships are for various types of people.

Let's begin with few key points to frame this discussion:

1. The truth is that t.i.m.e isn't manageable. But people are, in that they can manage how they bring themselves to their time available.

2. Time is the great equalizer. It's the only thing there is that we each have in equal proportion every full day of our life.

3. There is no right or wrong use of time -- it's all relative to individual purpose.

Knowledge is power. One goal: become more knowledgeable about how to befriend Time so it can serve versus challenge us.

To begin, let's go to Murphy's Law, Corollary 6:

 "Whenever you set out to do something, something else has to be done first."

Prioritizing sometimes seems like managing and sorting a million changing shades of gray. Ann McGee Cooper in her excellent book, Time Management For Unmanageable People, draws attention to an amazing fact: our particular culture/world is divided into two types of people in relationship to approaches to time:

 

1. Convergent thinkers
    
2. Divergent thinkers

Convergent thinkers are those who jive to Franklin Planners, Day Timers, and "To Do" Lists. They fit absolutely beautifully right into the Stephen Covey/Roger Merrill model of 'First Things First." Convergers thrive on taking the whole, breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces, and lining these up sequentially. They prioritizing with pleasure -- then checking off with glee the ‘done deal’ items. They find it easy to simply start at the beginning and/or at the end and work forward or backward.

It makes so much sense -- to a convergent thinker.

Then we have equally divergent thinkers -- often in the same office or family. Divergent thinkers scan the big picture, looking at a situation or task from varied, new points of view. They love to generate more and more facts and ideas, creating a bigger and bigger view to get a sense of the direction and results wanted. Divergent thinkers mainly intuit and arrive instinctively at conclusions. They leap to the answers -- rather than on analyzing and reviewing pre-known data most others require.

But first -- divergent thinkers must find the outer perimeter's of many if not ALL of the 'what 'if's.' Once they ‘have a sense of things’ they ‘see’ a whole series of action steps to take. They they may prefer to take the steps simultaneously or in a hop-scotch pattern. (This drives others crazy, as some of you may

have noticed, but it’s a perfectly natural way to proceed for a gifted divergent thinker. These people can really keep all this straight though their desk/office may look a wreck in the process.)

You may have guessed it by now. Divergent thinkers are those creative right-brainers with a variety of piles -- all of which are essential, all of which they move progressively forward. It just doesn't always look like progress to the organized, sequentially ordered world of the more left-brained.

Convergent thinkers, in contrast, are those who can actually create and stick to time-lines, critical paths with dates that stick, and schedules. They also organize things into labeled and categorized files and they are famous for their bulletin boards reflecting their goals and accomplishments.

I've brought this contrast forward because our most respected time-management systems may only have real value for about 50% of persons in business. If you've failed #101 Franklin Quest or Day-Timer, give yourself a break. It’s NOT a fault -- your naturally different approach to the use of time is actually a gift

once you learn to use it. For help with this, get McGee's book and dive into the strategies for the highly creative. You are the people who cannot write on a calendar the standard size -- much less stay inside the lines in orderly fashion. But...you often finish first and best, nonetheless.

Most of today's thinking about goal-setting and being organized and time-efficient is based on a belief in the importance of clock time. "Clock time" is man-created. It is not actually even natural to us to use this. None of us arrived with watches, you’ll notice.

Clock time is called monocratic time. However, much of life's most important stuff happens in it's own time -- not according to hands or symbols on a clock. These more important occurrences are polychronic happenings in nature with many complex factors at play. For example, creativity, 'Eureka!' breakthrough experiences, the experience of 'flow' -- some of our richest business and personal assets -- only happen during polychronic experiences of time.

This is when time flies. Hours pass when it only seems like minutes. Then time stands still for us and tons of time seems available and we have more than enough to achieve. Corporations, many entrepreneurs and the majority of home-based business owners have now figured this out. You are seeing more and more honoring of 'flex time' or of getting it done in your own style and clock-time as long as you get it handled. Finally, finally -- those who have always needed to operate this way now have the chance.

Productivity is NOT falling, according to the companies permitting partial or complete home-based corporate employment. Many who own home-based businesses can also attest to this once the essential discipline to be with less formal structure is In place.

Without this freedom, Larry Dossey, M.D., physician and holistic thinker, notices we begin to acquire what he calls "hurry sickness." This has what has spawned all the need for time therapies and all the time-management programs. He encourages all of us who want to befriend time to discover who we are in relationship to it and to honor how we fit into our timely world.

This quote from one of our masters of life also tells it as it is:

Physician Stephan Rechtschaffen, founder of the world-renowned Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, brings our full attention to the timeless gift time can be to us in his book, Time Shifting.

Rechtschaffen tells us the trickle-down approach to time has basically 'trickled out.' He tells us what no longer works is giving only what time is left after work, family, friends and community/cause to ourselves.

The actual reverse is what creates the synergy and centrifugal force of life that is self-renewing and self-recharging. By weaving in care of ourselves ALONG WITH our other priorities, there is always enough of us to share and to bring to the forefront. One way to do that is to recognize how we bring ourselves to time and to begin to use that knowledge to let time be gift vs curse.