Time Stewardship and the Creative Life

I want to talk about time management.

Actually, I don’t want to talk about time management, but I need to use to time management as a way to get to where I’m going, so stick with me.

Time management, as you probably already know, is organizing your time in a way that maximizes productivity. It asks you to coax as much profit potential as possible from the limited hours in a day by doing things like batching similar tasks, eliminating distraction, and prioritizing appropriately. Employers _love_ to talk about time management, because “good” time management means more work done in fewer work hours. And that, in turn, makes paying employees for their time a better investment.

Time management sees time as finite and valuable and, therefore, something to be harnessed and used efficiently.

And don’t get me wrong, time is finite and valuable but, in the context of a creative and fulfilling life, I think we need to look at it as something more. It’s not just finite and valuable, it’s fleeting and precious. Recognizing the difference in those descriptors is what has made me want to think differently about my relationship with time.

Something that is finite and valuable is a resource to be exploited, to be used in the service of some definable purpose (see: capitalism).

Something fleeting and precious though, that’s something to be appreciated. It’s something to cherish. It’s true that once a moment is gone, we can never get it back, but that doesn’t mean that it’s wasted if each second isn’t “productive” in an economic sense. Our time is not an oilfield. It’s a cherry blossom.

This is why I’ve been using the term, “time stewardship” instead of “time management.” When applied to land, stewardship is ethical management. It’s thoughtful, active care with an eye to the future—to conservation and longevity.

If we think about the ethical management of time in the same sense, then we’re speaking of the thoughtful, active care of the very essence of your existence in this world. Your relationship to time will tell you your answer to Mary Oliver’s poignant question, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Actually, that line from Mary Oliver gets quoted a lot, but we don’t as often hear the preceding lines in that same poem, “The Summer Day:”

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Time stewardship is knowing how to pay attention. It’s recognizing the value in being “idle and blessed.”

And just as in land stewardship, where understanding our own role in the interconnected and ever-changing ecosystems is essential to preserving them, I think time stewardship can teach us how to look at time as its own sort of ecosystem.

On her podcast, Grow with Soul, Kayte Ferris spoke about recognizing the impact that different parts of our life have on each other.

When we disconnect the elements of our lives in our brains, we aren’t able to see how they affect each other. So when we experience a problem, our go-to explanation is that we are somehow a failure, rather than one part of our lives might be affecting another. For example, sometimes I can’t concentrate and I think “god I’m so rubbish I’ve got no focus what the hell is wrong with me”, and then I remember I’ve had nothing to eat yet and that actually I’m just a bit hungry.

-Grow with Soul, Episode 130

The time we spent eating impacts the time we spend working, which impacts the time we spend with family and friends, which impacts the time we spend resting, which impacts the time we spend strolling through fields and kneeling down in the grass, which impacts the time we spend eating…and so on and so on.

Each of us has our own unique time ecosystem, our own ball of, as The Doctor would put it, “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff” so, to be proper stewards of the time we have, we have to start by connecting with exactly how our specific ecosystem works.

Time stewardship starts out as time awareness.

Let me give you an example.

On the first episode of Downton Abbey, cousin Matthew arrives fresh from his middle class life in Manchester and explains his schedule to the Grantham family. When he mentions that he works five days a week, but will have weekends free, the Dowager Duchess archly questions, “What is a…week end?”

I think we’re all familiar with the concept of weekends these days, but when I saw this scene, my first thought was, “I want that.” I want my life and work to be so fully-integrated, to have such ease and flow, that the difference between weekends and weekdays no longer registers as a huge difference for me.

You may be completely different. I have many friends who approach their jobs as discrete chunks of time set aside for work, completely separate from personal time, and they would no sooner work on a weekend than they would scamper off to an amusement park on an average Tuesday morning.

Both approaches are perfectly valid, but I do believe that the concept of “work-life balance” as it’s so often put to us, is a myth, primarily because work is life. For many, it takes up a third or even more of the hours available each day. The idea of setting those hours aside and marking them as something other than life is poor time stewardship indeed. Every hour we spend being, sleeping, playing, eating and yes…working…is life. Being aware of those hours—all of them—allows us to make conscious choices about how to manage our wobbly-wobbly time ecosystems, and that’s an essential part of being stewards rather than simply managers of our lives.

Another part of time stewardship is routine. You might think routine is anathema to the “awareness” I just spent five minutes talking about, but they go hand-in-hand. Who among us doesn’t have actions that we repeat time after time, day in and day out, whether it’s something as simple as drinking a cup of coffee in the morning or as complex as writing, filming, and editing a weekly YouTube video.

Routine is one of those areas where traditional time management and time stewardship intersect, because the right routines help us to get the things that are important to us done. They also ensure that we’re not wasting mental and physical energy on reinventing the wheel each day, freeing up brain space to think about other things.

But just because we’re performing the same actions over and over again, doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate them as they’re happen and approach them with joyful awareness. Over the last several months, I’ve developed a routine of waking up in the morning, going through my “getting ready for the day” actions, stepping outside for a walk, and pouring a cup of coffee. The daily steps roll me right through to to the moment when I sit down in front of my computer to start writing or editing. Far from performing all those rote actions in a zombielike stupor, though, I find that the very habit of it becomes ritual. The actions are the same each day, but the moments are not.

The last thing I want to talk about is rest. When I think about rest and time stewardship, I don’t think of a 15-minute break every four hours with and hour for lunch and 8 hours or sleep of each night (although of course those things are important).

Instead, I think of letting a field lie fallow for a season, of leaving fallen leaves to slowly decay beneath a blanket of snow, of allowing a slow and steady rain to soak deep into an aquifer. I think of how, in the right season, time can naturally bring about rejuvenation. If you allow it.

Several months ago, I was scrolling through Instagram and saw a graphic, by Sasha, who created the business Frank + Feel and the podcast This is Your #RemindHer. It looked something like this:

January

February

March

May

June

July

September

October

November

When my eyes fell on those gaps. those wide-open spaces, between the months of March and May, July and September, and November and January, I felt something release inside of me. It was the sort of moment when your whole being just relaxes and says, “Ahhhh. This is it. This feels right.”

And so, in the spirit of my own time stewardship, once every four months, I’ve decided to rest. I will allow for a fallow season, even as I continue to mindfully notice my time as it passes, as I pour morning coffee and take daily walks, as I open myself to rejuvenation, as I cradle my moments like cherry blossoms rather than stripe mine them for their productivity value.

Awareness is time stewardship, routine is time stewardship, rest is time stewardship.