Are the issues we have with time management rooted in how we have evolved to think about time?

I have always maintained an interest in the concept of time, but not in a measurement, physics, or universe sense, rather how it appears to influence our thinking.

I was recently confronted with the one year anniversary of my father’s passing. During the weeks before this event, in between chores and taking care of an infant, I was trying to latch on to some kind of meaning. This awful day was now destined to come around ad infinitum until the end of my own days, but I realized I could exercise some choice in what I chose to do with it, as long as I understood what was happening.

Immediately following the death of anyone our brains must embark on the complex process of grief: Emotions will flare, unresolved issues will surface, and the question of what our lives mean now will deplete our time and energy for months, if not years.

Within this emotional quagmire of trying desperately to pair a strong desire for meaning within a mental milieu of painful uncertainty, it seemed perfectly human to turn the date of death into an event. By turning it into an event there is structure and organization and a steady onset of peace can return. Perhaps marking this day even allows us to feel responsible or that we are somehow doing right by the deceased, when really we have only found a slapdash way of ameliorating the guilt that we may soon start to forget them.

I blame all of this on seasonal thinking, which appears to have been with us since the dawn of humanity.

Thinking of time as circular certainly made sense from the days of early humans. The sun and moon arc across the sky, day follows night follows day, the seasons rotate around, tides go in and out, and a level of certainty is bestowed upon the witnesses to these events; a comforting eternal rhythm that would reliably eventually repeat itself. Expectation and hope flourish out of the anticipation of the next part of the repetition.

Seasonality has been strongly linked to the availability of food, which in more primitive times meant survival. The migration of animals and the lifecycle of crops have both presented challenges for humans to continue to eat, especially when there was a lull in the annual cycle. The return of food would inevitably be marked with celebrations.

Fast forward through the years and the days have become laced with holidays that reliably appear again the following year. Reappearance and rebirth are strong themes in mythology, no doubt because by the time they were cobbled together, cyclical thinking had become ingrained in many cultures; it made sense to those telling the stories and to those listening to them.

At this point, though, a fundamental error has been made. Time, as understood by the cycle of the year, is not how human life works. Despite the seasonal cycles we witness, our lives are linear. We are born, we age, we die, and we don’t come back. Even when the Earth appears the same after the passage of a year, it isn’t.

Seasonality appears to have provided us with so much comfort and reason to celebrate and find meaning in recurrence that it has ruined our ability to think clearly.

If our minds are primed to view events coming around again, it is perhaps easier to forget about aging and our forthcoming deaths. By minimizing these thoughts, one of the greatest anxieties of all time, existential dread, can be pushed to the background. This cyclical illusion of sameness perhaps shields us from the thought mandated by confronting change in our lives. If we feel that we are still experiencing the same natural rhythms from our childhood, maybe that is when we decide to drop anchor on our desire for further change or growth?

Viewing time as circular protects us from the burden of thought, but it also creates the burden of finding meaning in recurrence where there perhaps isn’t any. There may have been a time in the early days of humanity when we were likely to die much younger and that keeping ourselves within seasonal thinking overall benefitted us, but now that we are living much longer, perhaps it is time to stretch things out and stop spinning around?

I appear to be wired in such a way that this time every year for the rest of my life, I will at least sense that this is the time of year in a previous year that I lost my father. But it is worth reminding myself that one, he wouldn’t want me to make an event out of his death, and two, the idea of riding with him along the track to the end of my own days, is far more meaningful than the yearly occurrence of death day.

Our awareness of time used to come solely through sunrise and sunsets, and the changing weather and seasons informed us of the changing world. Thoughts about time in the early days of humanity were more about the passage of transitional periods; it was raining, now it isn’t; it was dark and now it’s light; the ice has now melted. These transitions all came with an inherent meaning; I no longer need to shelter, the time for sleep has past; this patch of ground is no longer dangerous. The buffalo have returned so we can hunt.

The beauty of these gentle reminders is that it is difficult to obsess over their meaning in the same way that electronic reminders through everyday interfaces notify us of the time - all the time. We knew what these transitional periods meant. But now if we see that it is 5:37:34, now what?

So what?

Today, thoughts of time seem to come with the guilt that we should be doing something or we enter into mental arithmetic to figure out how much time we have between the moment in the present and the time for something else later – and then attempting to figure out what that means for us right now and how it should determine what we do and think about before the arrival of this next event. While in the middle of a transition (it is raining, dark etc.), we can permit ourselves to forget about time until the transition is over. Now we seem to be held hostage by the many things that make sure we know what the time is.

When we are awake, most our day has become governed by having to know the time. Within a generous 75 hours of work week, for at least 50 hours we are commuting to and from and work and are present at work, all the while wanting to know what time it is so that we can perform mental calculations to prepare for future events and attempt to manage travel to save as much time as possible. While it is natural to contemplate death and our remaining alive time, we seem to be applying the same angst to make sure we are productive every day.

This has a serious impact on our ability to relax.

Moments of fun with loved ones or daring to nap, the magic only happens when we can banish thoughts of time from our minds. We can only relax when we forget or are allowed to forget about time. However, we appear to have trained ourselves into thinking that if we do not attempt to control and provide meaning to time, we will lose productivity, and be unable to exercise certain desires, lusts, and feelings before we get too old, which society tells us will be tomorrow.

If genuine fun and relaxation can only occur when we forget about time, then we have surely set ourselves up to fail. Even vacations are one of the most time regulated activities (services) on the market; not just planning for a time of year, but having an itinerary and schedule upon arriving. We are forever destined to hear, “I need a vacation to relax from having a vacation.”

The fact that we have become obsessed with getting things done and doing things faster might not be the sign of a technologically savvy society, but a sign that we are sick, our natural drives and impulses have been appropriated by the mundane, and we no longer have a healthy relationship to time… life… ourselves.

I think we are also wired to obsess about the meaning of our time, because it is our attempt to control the future as we envision it, which is really just making ourselves feel less anxious in the present. Ideas of a comfortable future make us feel content and secure, and conversely, thoughts of a chaotic future fill us with dread and peptic ulcers. How we end up in the future is in some ways beside the point, because what we are really trying to do is feel satisfied and happy in the present – by doing what we need to do to secure good thoughts of the future.

Controlling thoughts about the future is also integral to our sense of morality. Take the golden rule, for example – treat others as you yourself would like to be treated. How would you like to be treated? We need to think about a hypothetical future scenario that involves us being treated a certain way and deciding whether or not we would like it.

Furthermore, if we begin to lose interest in the outcome of various relationships or activities, we will start to neglect those relationships or activities. It is not a moral issue if we no longer care to play the piano, but if we are no longer interested in personal relationships, we could start to neglect people. In fact, a common reason for romantic relationships to fail is that at least one person in the relationship doesn’t see a future. Considering our own futures and being considerate towards the future of those we care about is clearly fundamental for moral behavior and thought.

To achieve happy future thoughts, we often set ourselves certain rules and make plans governing our behavior in the present, usually in the name of saving money, staying healthy and in shape, and perhaps not getting fired from the job we tolerate.

Our drive to be moral, by putting regulation around our behavior in the future, might be another instinctual impulse that has been appropriated by those who seek to control and influence our behavior where the regulation is not so much about morality but about getting more productivity out of us by coloring our views of what is good behavior and what is bad behavior. Are people easier to handle if we can keep them checking the time? They won’t require regulation because they will do it themselves at their own expense.

All of these rules are often at the expense of fun and cheap kicks.

So, every now and again maybe we will rebel and decide to “Seize the Day!”,

 driving the future temporarily from our minds. Although, obviously when we do choose to live in the moment it’s still done in a controlled way – none of us really believe that the day to be seized is the be all and end all of our lives, and these moments usually come to an end when we decide to check what time it is.