An edited version of this article was published in A New Kind of Knowledge, ed. Jack Petranker (Dharma Publishing, Berkeley CA, 2004), pp. 94-117.
Time is like a mirror–it reflects different things, depending on how we look at it.
This statement implies that time is not a constant, but somehow changes depending on our consciousness, and on our view of time. If this is true, perhaps we don’t need to race against time, or see it as a scarce resource, in spite of what our culture teaches us! Perhaps the assumptions that conventional time management programs work with need to be investigated more closely.
Most conventional time management (CTM) workshops promise to help get more done with less stress. They generally rely on the following steps, all useful:
Clarify and write down your long- and short-term objectives in major areas of life. Keep the objectives current.
Break projects down into doable tasks. Update project plans as necessary.
For all identified tasks, set priorities and estimate the time required so that you’re aware of what’s important and when things are scheduled.
Schedule periodically and create to-do lists and calendars with scheduled tasks and appointments.
Do the tasks, focusing on top priorities, and doing things in the time allocated (except for unexpected changes).
Periodically ask: “What is the best use of my time right now?” Change tasks as appropriate.
Some programs that center on these themes promise to lead to mastery of time. But how can we master time if we don’t understand what it is? How can we get things done without feeling overwhelmed or anxious, if we don’t know exactly how time pressures us?
What Causes Time Pressure?
Time pressure is one of the greatest sources of stress for most people. According to a survey he conducted with top and mid-level executives, Dr. Richard Winter reported, “According to almost three of every four . . . executives . . . the most stressful situation was the one that occurred most frequently: work demands and time pressures.” (Coping with Executive Stress, Richard E. Winter, M.D.) Referring to the general U.S. population, Dr. Stephan Rechtschaffen wrote, “I would say that 95 percent of the stress in our lives relates to our feeling of time poverty.” (Time Shifting, Stephan Rechtschaffen, M.D.) Time poverty is the sense that you don’t have enough time, that it’s a scarce commodity. And Dr. Larry Dossey wrote, “Many illnesses–perhaps most–may be caused either wholly or in part by our misperception of time. . . . I am convinced that we can destroy ourselves through the creation of illness by perceiving time in a linear, one-way flow.” (Space, Time and Medicine, Larry Dossey, M.D., Shambhala, Boston & London, 1982.)
What is the source of time pressure? It is easy to list candidates: a few might include demands from the boss, deadlines, a to-do list that’s too full, disorganization and confusion about what to do, unclear priorities, lack of an effective scheduling system, and imbalance in the energies of the body. It would be useful for you to reflect for yourself on what you think the causes of time pressure are before going on, and see if you can add to this list.
All of these examples are in some sense external, even if they result from our own lack of planning or organization. But is that the whole picture? For instance, consider deadlines. A deadline seems the most obvious cause of time pressure, starting with the deadlines we faced in school to finish assignments. We tend to think that pressure is somehow built into deadlines themselves, that there’s something objectively ‘real’ about deadline pressure. But is it true that deadlines always cause pressure? Or is there some other factor at work? In my own experience, there have been lots of times when I felt pressured under a deadline and was able to turn the whole thing around, sometimes even ending up with a peak experience.
Have you had similar experiences? Please think about this a minute. Have you had a deadline where you felt significant pressure, then got into the work so much that the pressure changed, and perhaps completely disappeared?
If you have ever had an experience like this, it suggests that the pressure really isn’t built into the deadline. There’s something we can do to change the experience. There’s some other way to relate to the deadline.
Pressure Is Related to Involvement
Staying with the example of a deadline, it seems that pressure somehow depends on the way we relate to the deadline. It depends on our perspective, on how much we’re involved in what we’re doing.
Let’s take a little closer look at this idea. We typically use the word “involvement” very loosely. We have different verbs to indicate the degree to which we’re involved in what we’re doing. I might be “holding back,” which means I have something to do, but I’m resisting it. Perhaps I think about it, but then put it out of my mind. If I get a little more ‘involved’, I’ll “resign myself” to doing the job. Basically that seems to mean I’m not just putting it out of my mind any longer. With a bit more ‘involvement’, I “get into” the job. A bit more than that, and I can say for the first time that I’m “really involved,” literally meaning that I’m “turned in” to the activity. Beyond that, I’m “absorbed” or “engrossed.”
Now, here’s a very important question to ask yourself. If you consider your past experiences, as you got more involved, what happened to the pressure? Please think about this a minute before going on.
Based on my own experience and the experience of many hundreds of people I’ve talked to, this “involvement scale” when applied to the experience of time leads to the following principle: The pressure we feel is directly proportional to how much we’re resisting what we’re trying to get done. If we’re holding back or resisting, then there’s pressure; if we relax, get into it, get really involved, there’s no pressure. The pressure dissolves. Total involvement = no pressure; detached holding back = pressure.
Holding back is something like distanced observation, as in the old adage: “A watched pot never boils.” If you take a point of view separate from things, distant from what’s happening, time will seem to pass strongly. There will be an intense sense of friction and lack of control, no matter whether time goes quickly or slowly. On the other hand, if you don’t take and hold a point of view, but get completely into whatever is happening, time won’t seem to pass at all, or else will pass without friction or feeling out of control. This is when you’ll be most creative and productive.
This discussion of pressure leads directly to the heart of ITM, Inner Time Management. If pressure really depends on our perspective, there is something we can do about it. We can manage time internally; we can change the feeling of time passing by changing our attitudes and our approaches. We are not victims of time.
But before we look at this more closely, we need to ask some basic questions. What is time all about? At this point, I have a request to make. Please take some paper, set aside a few minutes, and address the question, “What is time?” Do some thinking about this and write some notes before going on. Even if you don’t get a definitive answer, it’s very useful to begin seriously asking this question.
Types of Time
It can be useful to identify three types or ‘faces’ of time:
Event time is the continual occurrence of physical and experiential events. The word “event” is used to describe something that happened, or is happening ‘now’, like getting up in the morning, feeding a pet, a car honking its horn, or noticing that you’re hungry. Event time is what we hear and see on the TV and radio news shows.
A second face of time is symbolized by tools for measuring ‘event time’. We measure length and distance in different ways–by means of rulers, yardsticks, and odometers in cars. And different cultures in the world measure event time in different ways. Most cultures use clocks and watches, and subtract a ‘start time’ from a ‘stop time’ to figure out ‘how long’ something takes. But there have also been cultures that use “the length of time it takes to cook rice” as a way to measure ‘how long things take’. ‘Telling time’ is knowing how to measure time in your culture, knowing how much measured ‘clock time’ corresponds to the events that are happening ‘now’. Most children’s books on time are primarily about learning how to ‘tell time’ this way.
Since American-European cultures focus on measured time and events in physical time, time management in Western countries has become simply a matter of choosing, organizing, and scheduling events. The purpose of conventional time management (CTM) is to help us produce more in a given period of measured time, and thereby decrease some of the anxiety and pressure we feel about time.
But is that enough? Although time-management seminar graduates may be able to accomplish more as a result of their training, there is growing recognition that they still feel like they don’t have enough time. Some even feel that things have gotten worse. As Stephen Covey says, “Concerns about quality of life are just as likely to come from someone with a high level of [conventional] time-management training as from someone without it” (p. 31, First Things First).
This suggests that instead of focusing just on events in time, on what we’re doing, we would do well to also explore how things are going—the range of experience that runs from feeling overwhelmed and pressured on the one hand to things flowing so well we’re not even aware of time passing. Exploring how it’s going, the quality or feeling of time, is the domain of inner time management (ITM). It leads to the third face of time.
The third face of time is probably most important for our happiness, although it’s also probably the face that is least understood and most undervalued. Here we will call it felt time, though it might also be called experienced time. Felt time includes all the different ways we feel or experience time. We may feel time move quickly when we’re having ‘a great time’. During some of the best moments of our lives, things seem timeless, with little or no feeling of time passing. On the other hand, we feel time ‘drag’ or pass slowly when we’re bored, or having ‘a bad time’. And we feel anxious about time when it seems we don’t have enough of it.
Optimizing Feelings of Time
This is where ITM comes in. Rather than the usual CTM focus on what we want to do, ITM gives methods to optimize the moment-by-moment feelings of time, including the way we relate to our current activity. ITM teaches how to increase involvement by moving through the stages of involvement that were already introduced above:
(1) holding back from doing something; (2) resigning ourselves to doing something; (3) getting into it; (4) being involved; (5) being engrossed or absorbed.
By moving toward the complete absorption of peak performance, we can transform troublesome feelings of time passing—including ‘overwhelm’, time pressure, frustration, boredom, and anxiety about not having enough time.
Learning and consistently using both CTM and ITM methods is valuable for almost everyone. CTM can help us get more done, but ITM helps us directly improve the quality of our lives. Neither CTM nor ITM by itself resolves all our issues with time. But by combining the discipline of planning and organizing what we do with methods of improving the way we do things, there is no limit to our productivity and well-being.
“Western Standard Time” (Linear Time)
The usual way that most adults in the West experience time is as linear time. This is an experiential perspective completely independent of measured time. It combines (1) the actual feeling of time passing in a linear and directed way from one moment to another, (2) the separation of past from present and present from future, and (3) a sense that you are positioned only now, in the present.
In the linear view, time is like a conveyor belt that moves horizontally at a constant and unchangeable speed between past, present, future ‘rooms’ in our experience. These different aspects of time are actually felt to be separate. We are located in the present ‘room’.
Linear time is a major feature of our Western cultural world-view. It may have originated with Newton, some 300 years ago, since Newton portrayed time as an absolute physical reality, and regarded the passage of time as independent of consciousness. From a linear-time world-view, it doesn’t matter what you think, feel, or do, or how you look at time—time doesn’t change. As a result, we may feel somewhat helpless in the face of time. It seems our only choice is to adapt to this temporal ‘reality’, finding ways to work ‘within’ its limitations as skillfully as possible. This is the basic model that CTM programs work with.
Despite this ‘standard’ understanding that time is independent of consciousness, we somehow also feel a flow of time within ourselves, an internal mirroring of the ‘real’, constant external flow. This is considered the norm. In fact, we use the phrase “losing track of time” to indicate a kind of negligence when our internal feeling of time passing (FTP) doesn’t ‘accurately track’ the presumed external flow of time. Our sense of time (SOT), the ability to estimate what the clock time is, seems connected to our FTP. It is often believed to result from an internal biological mechanism that tracks or measures external time flow.
It is the FTP that sets up the host of familiar problems mentioned above, relating to time pressure, anxiety, time poverty, etc. But as long as FTP is thought to simply mirror external events, it’s considered unchangeable, like the presumed constant external flow of time. So we’re left with the prospect of—at best—adapting to an uncontrollable flow of time and its attendant pressure and transitoriness. Is that really the only choice we have?
A Case Study: Procrastination
Procrastination offers an interesting example of how our feeling of time passing is created and strengthened. Suppose I have a speech I want to prepare. It’s Monday, and the speech is scheduled for Thursday. Suppose I have a four-hour block of time today that I can use to prepare the speech, and no other open time before Thursday. Now is definitely the best time to work on it, if I want to do a good job.
I begin working on the script for the talk. The work goes pretty well. Sentences flow; the work goes almost by itself, effortlessly. Before long, I am so engrossed in the writing that I’m not aware of any feeling of time passing. Nor am I aware of past, present, or future. There’s only timeless absorption in my work.
Eventually I get a little confused about the message I want to get across. Because I don’t face the confusion head on, my mind starts to wander. I look at the clock and realize it’s almost time for my favorite TV show. Pretty soon I’m thinking about how I might be able to finish my preparation right after the show is over, before I go to bed. Yes, it seems possible! I think I have enough time. So I put my work aside and watch the show.
But once I have started to procrastinate, the quality of my experience suffers. Watching the show is not as enjoyable as I’d hoped it would be, because awareness is divided between watching the show and being aware that I have to do my work. Time is passing relentlessly, and it feels like the future is closing in on me. I am watching TV here in the present, feeling anxious and guilty about a job waiting for me in the future. In addition, I have missed an opportunity, and feel less confident and capable as a result.
So as a result of procrastination, I end up with a stronger FTP, together with a greater separation between present and future. When I started my work, I really concentrated. The experience was timeless. Now, after procrastinating, my sense of time has changed for the worse. If I take the standard view that time is simply a physical reality, flowing at a constant speed independent of our consciousness, I can fool myself into thinking that procrastination is simply rescheduling a task to a different container on the conveyor-belt of time. But that is not the truth of the experience. My procrastinating has actually created the conveyor with its containers, along with the feeling of being out of control of time’s flow.
This deeper analysis of the process warrants redefining procrastination as follows: Procrastination is the repression or suppression of an unpleasant feeling that results in temporally separating oneself from a task. We’re familiar with spatial separations, where we can build walls or just walk away from something. But we can also temporally separate ourselves from things we don’t like. What seems to happen is that the energy of the feeling that we don’t like (confusion, in my example) is pushed away and transformed into a felt experience of time passing. The energy isn’t lost, it’s just changed to a different form.
Rather than measuring or mirroring a presumed ‘external flow’ (which scientists haven’t found), our FTP seems to measure how much we’re resisting what we’re doing, and is the aggregate result of resisting past negative experiences. In this sense, the commonly perceived structure of time is actually a transformation of energy that we don’t like. We could even say that repressed energy is all that constitutes our common experience of time. To put it differently, our sense of time passing measures our separation from whatever we’re doing, and is not an accurate mirroring of external forces or events. When our FTP grows out of past resistance, no wonder our typical experience of time is discomfort and frustration.
What this means is that full schedules and modern speedy technology are not the problem. And this is a good thing. We can learn to dismantle the FTP, gradually moving toward the timelessness and fulfillment of peak experiences. But to do that, we have to question linear time.
The Construction of Time
The experience of linear time is very common in our culture; however, felt time is different in other cultures. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall says, “each culture has its own time frames in which the patterns are unique.” (p. 4, The Dance of Life) According to Hall, the Navajo consider the future uncertain and unreal, so a Navajo is often neither interested in nor motivated by ‘future’ rewards (p. 28). Similarly, Hopis often have no timetables or schedules in their minds for ordinary projects, such as building a house. Even in European cultures, there are differences: Northern Europeans tend to do one thing at a time in accord with a fixed schedule, while Mediterranean cultures stress involvement of people and completion of transactions rather than adherence to preset schedules, and appointments are not taken all that seriously. In comparing East and West, Hall makes a more general point (p. 91), “In the West . . . time is an outside force helping us to organize our lives. In the East, time springs from the self and is not imposed.”
Felt time depends on the culture, but it also depends on individual learning within a culture. As infants we have no sense of time flowing in a linear way. The sense of linear time is developed gradually, and child-development studies suggest that it fully present by about the age of seven.
How does linear time get set up? Drawing on the descriptions found in the Kum Nye Relaxation and TSK books, here is a quick summary: A feeling begins to arise in awareness. But rather than feel the feeling, we turn away from it. The feeling is repressed or suppressed, and we lose a measure of confidence as well as a bit of the natural fulfillment that accompanies being fully involved in our energies. The energy flowing in the heart is lessened, and we feel somewhat pressured. Excess energy flows to the head. As our thinking skips here and there in the separate past, present, and future rooms in our experience, a sense of detached self-consciousness intensifies. Energy in the throat, which is closely associated with time, becomes agitated as we become anxious and more aware of time passing. We feel more helpless; time becomes more threatening, a greater enemy. There’s a sense of a dissatisfied self confined to its one small moment of time, reaching out to seek satisfaction via various objects and activities or looking to other people to fulfill desires. The self ‘looks forward’ to things, but has difficulty fully appreciating them. We always have to move on.
The linear view of time is perhaps the least productive and healthy way to experience time. It usually involves anxiety, pressure, and friction, and a division of awareness between the present job and concern with the future–there’s always wasted mental and emotional energy.
But the linear experience of time is not the only option available to us. Instead of linear time, more enlightened individuals apparently somehow learn to find a sense of stillness within all activities. For example, Tarthang Tulku (TSK, p. 136) writes, “Time is neither linear nor sequential; in fact, there are neither moments nor successive movement, and thus no succession.” Can we arrive at an understanding or experience closer to this description? Can we dismantle the FTP, gradually moving toward the timelessness and fulfillment of peak experiences?
The Optimal Way of Experiencing Time
Is there an optimal way of experiencing time? For an answer, you can check your own experience. What was your experience of time during peak experiences, the best moments or periods of your life? During peak love or meditation experiences; during peak productivity; or in your best sports performances? Learning to rely on your own experience is important, so think about this question for a couple of minutes before reading on.
I’ve asked thousands of people the question in the previous paragraph. Again and again they say something close to this: “In those situations, time doesn’t flow, at least not in the ‘normal’ way. I’m either not aware of time passing at all, or it seems to go fast, but without a feeling of being out of control.”
This is very interesting. During their best moments, people are not feeling time in the ‘standard’ way, where time’s passing is out of our control, making us feel anxious. In this kind of experience, things are happening (‘event time’), yet ‘felt time’ doesn’t have an arrow–it doesn’t have a sense of flowing forward into the future.
If you think about it, this is a common experience. The things that we really enjoy and get involved in are ‘over before we know it’. This is a very particular kind of felt time, often called ‘timelessness’. When we’re completely absorbed in something, totally engaged or preoccupied, there’s a sense of being very present with what’s at hand, and time doesn’t seem to pass in the ‘standard’ way. Timelessness is a kind of ‘felt time’ that actually doesn’t seem to ‘pass’ at all.
Abraham Maslow noted this phenomenon in his best known book: “[There is] the frequent report, especially by lovers, of the complete loss of extension in time. It is as if they had, in a way, some place in another world in which time simultaneously stood still and moved with great rapidity.” (p. 76, Toward a Psychology of Being). As described by Linda S. Ackerman, for the peak performer there is “a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which he is in control of his actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present, and future.” (pp. 125-6, “The Flow State: A New View of Organizations and Managing,” in Transforming Work, ed. Adams)
Clock-Watching: An Experiment in Timelessness
Timelessness can be a fleeting experience. We are usually very focused in certain directions on goals that we have set, and seldom are very aware of the more subtle qualities of experience, especially the changes in the nuances of time passing.
Here is an exercise that provides a stable environment, so that you easily see variations in ‘felt time’—the changing feelings we have with, within, and about time. It may also clarify the differences between measured, or clock time and felt time. The exercise balances energy in the throat, where imbalance seems to produce pressure and anxiety about time (see p. 187, TSK, ex. 24,), as well as left and right brain hemispheres, as shown by research in applied kinesiology.
Set up your environment so that you have a quiet place and at least ten minutes when you won’t be interrupted or distracted: five minutes for the exercise and five minutes afterwards for reflecting and writing. Set up a clock to watch, preferably a large clock with a second hand that is 7-8 feet away from where you will sit. Watch the second hand, and concentrate loosely as you watch the hand move. Breathe easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth.
Watch for five minutes or so. It can be helpful to set a timer for five minutes, since that will relieve you of the need to track clock time. As you continue, see if you can let the breath become more and more even and continuous, without breaks or jerkiness—this is important. Evenness and continuity of the breath correspond closely to the clarity and peacefulness of awareness.
As you relax and observe the movement of the second hand, you might explore in a relaxed way these questions: Does the FTP change? If so, how? If there were any feelings of pressure and anxiety present at the outset, what happened to them? Did any new feelings of pressure or anxiety arise? Any other feelings? How is the quality of breathing related to flow of time? How is feeling of a separate self or observer related to the feelings of time passing?
At the end of the five minutes, make some notes about what happened—anything that strikes you as interesting or worth writing down. Did time feel out of control? Any anxiety about time? Did the speed of time change? If so, what changed, event time as measured by the clock, or felt time? Was every minute equally long? If you felt more relaxed at the end of the five minutes than you did at the beginning, reflect on what this means. If you can relax while watching the clock, you can probably stay relaxed in nearly any situation.
By balancing our breath and attention, we change our perception of time, lose awareness of time passing, and transform anxiety and pressure about time and deadlines. The type of breathing used in this exercise (borrowed from T. Tulku, 1978) is the most effective means of working with anxiety/pressure that I’ve found. You can practice it while sitting still like this, but you can also do it while involved in any activity.
What Inhibits Timelessness?
Having felt the anxious and pressured experience of linear time, and having occasionally known the freeing timelessness of peak experiences, we might very well ask, “What is it that keeps us from having more peak time-experiences?” This question can be answered in numerous ways. Here are three.
1. Western cultures implicitly teach that linear time is ‘normal’. They also confuse event time, measured time, and felt time, providing only one word for time. And they implicitly teach that we should always feel time flowing constantly (or we’re ‘losing track’ of time). This makes it difficult to facilitate peak experience, which has a timeless quality, or to allow for a sense of time passing that is free from friction.
2. Techniques to change ‘felt time’ aren’t commonly known. Numerous meditation techniques evoke a level of timelessness, though they often simply try to ignore time’s passing rather than examine exactly what time is. But apart from that, very few people are teaching direct methods to optimize our felt time. This is an area where a positive contribution can be made. The simple breathing practice described above is a good example.
3. We avoid ‘negative’ feelings and sensations. Western cultures implicitly teach that turning away from, or even suppressing any kind of ‘negative’ experience is normal and natural. However, turning away from ‘negative’ experiences strengthens the linear-time experience of time passing. Repressing or suppressing the energy of ‘negative’ feeling transforms into a stronger sense of time flowing, whether it seems to flow more slowly or more quickly. It helps to recognize that telating to experiences as ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ (where ‘positive’ is understood as the opposite of ‘negative’) is only one of numerous possibilities. For instance, one way to get into what’s happening is to try to find, and be at, the center of ‘negative’ feeling, rather than observing (or avoiding) it from a separate position. The same book that includes the breathing exercise I have already introduced (T. Tulku, 1978) includes various exercises, especially in volume 2, that give the opportunity to explore this approach. One that I have found especially effective is the exercise called “Heart Gold Thread.” The basic principle here is one I have already referred to: If you take a point of view separate from things, where you feel distant from what’s happening, time will seem to pass with a strong feeling of friction and lack of control. On the other hand, if you get completely into whatever is happening, time won’t seem to pass at all, or will pass without friction or feeling out of control.
Levels of Mastery of Time
We’ve taken a look at linear time, the ‘normal’ way of experiencing time in Western countries, and we’ve discussed optimal ways of experiencing time. But there’s a wide range of possible ways of relating to time–many different levels of mastery of time, and time stress. Here are six levels I have identified, with a short description of each:
1. Struggling Against Time Time is outside us, and we race and struggle against it. We are victims of pressure, overwhelm, and anxiety, and we think that this is normal and can’t be changed.
2. Wondering About Ways to Relate to Time Our relationship to time has loosened up, and we’re wondering about the possibilities. We no longer feel consistently pressured and anxious.
3. Seeing Time As An Ally, Not an Opposing Force Beginning to see how our experience of time is created, we are able to apply various methods to transform some time pressure and anxiety.
4. Allying with Time By seeing different levels of time, it becomes possible to reduce time stress by half, at least when you have the chance to take a break or relax.
5. Empowering Time You are aware of subtle pointings, including a separating of self and other. Now it is possible to reduce stress by half even in the midst of stressful situations.
6. Abiding in Time At this level, you never let time stress get established. You abide in the peaceful yet energetic eye of the whirlwind of activities.
This introductory presentation might give you some sense of at least the first few stages in this progression. But to get a real sense, you will have to do a lot of questioning and investigation. Doing the exercises I have mentioned, or other exercises in the TSK books that loosen up the experience of time, is important. If you don’t, it will probably take much, much longer to get the necessary insights and make the required changes in habitual ways of seeing and experiencing time.
Practice embodying a new relationship to time, and your experience can shift dramatically. As Stephan Rechtschaffen says, “Understanding time with your brain isn’t enough . . . . When you learn to embody time, when you can shift it at will, then you will experience a wholeness, a freedom—time freedom . . . . .” (Time Shifting, p. 20)
Two Closing Questions
Birds need two wings to fly. One is not more important than the other; they’re simply both necessary. Similarly, it seems that to measure progress in life, we need to periodically consider two questions. One question is, “Am I doing the right thing?” A second one is, “Am I doing things right?” Another way of stating the first question, mentioned early in this article, comes from time-management guru Alan Lakein (1973, p. 96): “What is the best use of my time right now?” This is a CTM question. Perhaps we haven’t really thought much about what we’re doing, and it would be better to do something else now. It seems that we think about Lakein’s question implicitly anyway–why not make it explicit?
The second question can be be rephrased in this way: “Am I timelessly involved in what I’m doing?” This is an ITM question. It invites you to compare your experience to what people report about peak experiences of all kinds—that there is no sense of time flowing in a way that feels out of control. Ask this question periodically and reflect honestly on the result. If you are not totally involved, or if you feel time passing in a way that has even a slight bit of pressure or anxiety, there’s room for improvement in both productivity and well-being. Look back at the exercises introduced here; perhaps they can help you identify what is between you and a timeless way of being and doing.
By finding the peaceful, yet most productive ‘zone’ at the center of our whirlwind of activities, we can transform our feelings of time flowing. We can let go of pressure, anxiety, and boredom, and we can get results “in no time.” Why not take the chance? Why not invest the time?
References
Lakein, Alan, 1973. How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (New York: Signet).
Richard E. Winter, M.D., 1983. Coping with Executive Stress (New York: McGraw-Hill).
Stephan Rechtschaffen, M.D., 1996. Time Shifting (New York: Doubleday).
Larry Dossey, M.D., 1982. Space, Time and Medicine (Boston & London: Shambhala).
Stephen R. Covey, 1994. First Things First (New York: Simon & Schuster).
Edward T. Hall, 1983. The Dance of Life (New York: Doubleday).
Tarthang Tulku, 1978. Kum Nye Relaxation, Parts 1 and 2 (Berkeley, Ca: Dharma Publishing).
Tarthang Tulku, 1977. Time, Space, and Knowledge (Emeryville, Ca: Dharma Publishing).
Abraham Maslow, 1962. Toward a Psychology of Being (Princeton, N. J.,Van Nostrand).
Linda S. Ackerman, in “The Flow State: A New View of Organizations and Managing,” in Transforming Work, ed. Adams
