Time Guilt
Over the course of the last few months, I’ve noticed a trend when speaking with people and clients about their time. For many of us, these days, it seems questions and anguish about how one allocates their time keep on popping up. I’ve come to call this: Time Guilt.
Recently, I was facilitating a Time Design workshop at a women’s leadership conference. When I mentioned this idea, the whole room let out a collective sigh. The idea of Time Guilt rang true across generations and career lanes.
And it makes sense. In any given moment, we are all being pulled in multiple directions. And while the overwhelming feeling is one of constraint, research tells us that we do have more “leisure” time than 50 years ago. But we feel constrained because we also have more signals to sort through. More inputs and expectations and opportunity costs to consider.
There are more choices for us than at any other time in history, largely thanks to our interconnected world and the little machines we carry with us every moment of the day. This contributes to what Bridgid Schulte coined as "Time Confetti" —when our time is fragmented into little bits of moments that we can barely grab onto before the next one comes streaming by.
We also serve in multiple roles in the different spheres of life and work. One might be a leader, a mentor, a parent, a partner, a child, a volunteer, a friend, and more. The many hats we wear contribute to this sense that we “should” be doing something else, because there is always something else we could be doing. Some area of our life that we feel we are neglecting.
And often, when we are swept up in the daily motions of our lives, we don't regularly have the time to pause and think about redesigning poorly performing processes that structure our time ineffectively. It's challenging to take a step back and go upstream and solve the root problem.
This is why it’s critical to deliberately carve out space to pause to think about our time and our aspirations and design a strategy to get oneself to where you want to go. The dizzying number of daily choices and demands on our time is not going down anytime soon, so if you don’t have a clear intention, you will get pulled into spending time on things that are not serving you. It’s like going to the grocery store when you’ve skipped a meal. You’ll walk out with a basket of odd items that got your attention but end up with nothing to make meals with. Instead,
Here are four practices to support you in moving past Time Guilt:
Build ritual and routine into your days – this will help you appreciate where you are and enjoy the moments that compose your days, weeks, and ultimately your life.
Get clear on your priorities – do the hard work of ranking them in the different spheres of your work and life. What will you say no to and why? If there was only one thing you could do, what is the most important?
Discern between what truly requires you and what needs to happen (perhaps by someone else’s hand) – you may find you can take a different role which allows you to be where you really need and want to be.
Think about your time as a tapestry that you are weaving – it’s not only about one piece or another, it’s about how they all work together and reinforce each other.