Time, Values, and Committed Action
By Siri Ming
We can not get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life, which would steal life's provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.
—Jennifer Matthews
Let’s start with some big questions: what even is time, and what does it mean to manage it? This question is at the heart of much stress and struggle in our culture. It's hard to conceptualize time–we can't "see" it, we can only experience it. To describe time, most cultures use spatial metaphors of some sort (Boroditsky, 2011). However, we don't all use the same ones. In English, we talk about future events as being “ahead” of us, while in other languages, such events might be described as being “below” (Mandarin) or “behind” (Aymara), reflecting how we read and write text. A few Australian Aboriginal languages do not use relative spatial terms (such as left/right), instead relying on absolute direction (north/south/east/west), and when they construct representations of time, such as when gesturing or sequence events, they do so from east to west! Similarly, we talk about duration of time using various metaphors—in English, we are more likely to use linear spatial metaphors (a long or short time) while in Greek, quantity metaphors are used more often (much or a little time).. And conversely some of us also measure distance by time — Americans and Canadians will talk about a destination being "an hour away" for example, and astronomers also measure distance in time—the "farthest" star that's been discovered is 13 billion light years away—that is, we (well, the Hubble astronomers at least!) essentially are traveling in time three quarters of the way back to the Big Bang to see it. Time is a funny thing.
Clearly, the way we talk about time influences behavior at all levels, from the self through to the larger culture. Our culture generally relates time to being a resource—which is helpful in recognizing that our time on this planet is indeed finite just as our other resources are. However, our language also relates to time being "spent" like money, making it seem useful only insofar as it gets us something or somewhere in the future. Time becomes instrumentalized—only important when “used” towards some productive end goal. But time is not something that can be saved and spent later, squirreled away for some future when it can be better used. We are only and ever here and now. Time is our experience of it.
So the question is: what do you want that experience to include?
How you answer this question will reflect your values—the qualities and actions that define how you want to be in everything you do. Ideally, we would “spend” our time on what we care about most. But for many of us, we struggle to “find the time” to do those things—or even the time to articulate what we would do if we had more time. We might procrastinate on what we think we should be doing or frantically try to catch up on what hasn’t been done.
What would it take for you to be able to do more of what you care about—and less of what you don’t?
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) views engaging in behaviors that are aligned with your values as “committed action”. Some of these actions might be easy to make time for. Reflect on your day—what activities are you already doing that you care deeply about? That’s great—you’ve created conditions that allow you to experience time in a meaningful way.
But how do you expand that out, so that more of your experiences are meaningful?
ACT can help here, when part of why we’re not engaging in committed action—like why we are procrastinating—has to do with experiential avoidance. Much of ACT is about using our language to get unstuck from the traps we set for ourselves with our own language (and that’s a matter for many other blog posts).
But that’s not all there is to engaging in committed action—“making the time” for activities that are important also requires “time management.” But what does that even mean? For many of us, the phrase “time management” conjures up images of endless to-do lists, missed deadlines, or the nagging sense that there’s never enough time to accomplish everything. But what if we reframe time management not as a rigid system of squeezing productivity out of every second but as a meaningful practice of aligning our time with what truly matters to us? Time management is not just about getting more done; it’s about ensuring that what we do aligns with our values and brings us closer to the life we want.
Time management is the management of our own experiences, and planning so that we can be more engaged in the experiences that we would most like to be. Planning is clearly an essential tool for constructing a meaningful life—as well as for exercising our responsibilities towards others. Like so much else we talk about in this blog series, time management fundamentally requires cooperation. "Time" as a resource can be viewed as a “network good”—it is most valuable when others also have access to it and can coordinate their time with yours. The whole concept of calendars and clocks and workdays/workweeks was essentially invented so that people could work together towards a common goal of some sort (including the common “goal” of just enjoying time together). After all, if you never had to do anything with or for anyone else, would it really matter when anything got done or happened?
Nonetheless, ultimately, a plan is just a bunch of words, a plan is just a thought of what we would like to be doing. In order to actually execute that plan, in order to manage our time and appreciate the activities that bring meaning into our life, we often need help. If you feel like you could use some help here, I recently developed some resources as a companion to Finding Your Why and Finding Your Way, which you can access in our free tools, here, as well as through New Harbinger’s Clinician’s Club.
But before you look at those resources (which are essentially about how you can use your own language to influence how you “manage” your time), I want to invite you to appreciate how you think—how you language—about time itself. As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, we generally use spatial metaphors for time. But not only is this different across cultures, we also each have our own unique way of “seeing” time—our learning histories have led each of us to our own particular spatial representations and metaphors of how time works for us. My partner (an artist) and I have done a fascinating exercise with lots of people over many years in many contexts, including a workshop at Burning Man in 2019, and I invite you to do it now.
Get a piece of blank paper, and something to draw with. Take a moment to center yourself here and now—take a breath, relax, feel the floor under your feet. Now, think about how you think about time/how time passes—could be the course of a year, or the course of your life, or more abstractly, there's no right or wrong to this. Draw this.
Now, take a look at your drawing and make some notes that explain it—this is your own language for time! Sit with this exercise for a while. When you do try to do some “time management” activities—visualizing your work or your time or anything else related to the course of your day, week, year, life, see if it helps to use this language in some way. It might or might not—there's no right or wrong answer here. But isn't it interesting to think about?
Boroditsky, L. (2011). How Languages Construct Time. In S. Dehaene & E. Brannon (Eds.), Space, Time and Number in the Brain (pp. 333-341). Elsevier.
