For as long as I can remember, I have had a complicated relationship with time. Much to the chagrin of my parents, I frequently bucked the system when it came to the concept of time constraints controlling my daily life. Now, it was not like I was lazy growing up. On the contrary, I was the dutiful eldest son who studied hard to get good grades and generally stayed out of trouble of all types.
Well, there was one summer that my parents built an addition onto our home without notifying us kids, thereby moving me out of my own bedroom while forcing my brother and me into child labor on the construction site all summer. When we complained our parents added days to our detention, to which I replied by crafting a sign that read “Welcome to Alcatraz” and posting it at the entrance to our property. That was fun!
You see, I felt I had earned the right to enjoy my summers given all of my diligence during the school year, as I graduated from high school in the top five percent of my class and later earned a bachelor’s degree from one of the best business schools in the nation. All of this was while holding down a variety of part time jobs of varying lengths, including for the better part of my first three years of college working in the dining hall.
And since that time the test for me has continually been reconciling the making of a life with making a living. As minister Ana Levy-Lyons states, “Time is the ultimate form of human wealth on this earth. Without time, all other forms of wealth are meaningless…To reclaim time is to be rich.” So to that end, I started my own business more than two decades ago in order to structure time to suit my schedule rather than another’s.
Suffice it to say that managing time is tactical but managing life is strategic, as time is measured in quantitative minutes but life is measured in qualitative moments. And author Jenny Odell writes in Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock: “Productivity is not the ultimate measure of the meaning or value of time. To imagine a different ‘point’ means also imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside the world of work and profit.”
Odell further suggests, “The widespread phenomenon of selling one’s time is historically specific and surprisingly recent. In early-nineteenth-century America, which was still largely rural, self-employed people outnumbered wage earners. Even after a dramatic rise in wage labor after the Civil War, it was compared to prostitution or slavery.” But whether we work for ourselves or others, we need to be mindful of time’s true value and manage it accordingly.