When did you last feel like you had “enough time”?

There’s something depressing about the question, some implication that this is a rare occurrence. You may have to reach back to that one project, years ago, where you managed to disappear into the work, lost in a state of flow. Or maybe you have to reach further back to childhood, when days stretched forever.

Even then, though, the experience was cut short. The flow was broken, the childhood day interrupted by being called in for dinner.

When we look a little deeper, we see there’s also something not quite right about the question. A lack of enough time feels like a common human experience, but… “enough time” to do what, exactly?

Complete your to-do list? Read all the books? Be with your family, with people you love and who love you in return? To finally write that book, to organise those projects, to send the emails, to go out for that run, to record that podcast?

The reality is that while it’s a common idea, “enough time” is an impossible concept. Still, we feel that sting of time poverty, of not even having enough time to do the basics, never mind the nice-to-haves.

Maybe we mean we don’t have enough time for ourselves, enough time to be ourselves. I think this points at an underlying truth, but we can still look a little deeper.

A recent interview I watched (with Joe Hudson) suggested a root cause: it’s not time we lack, but something else. We take the kids to school, but spend half the time worrying about finishing off that presentation. We then work on the presentation, spending half the time worrying about presenting it. We then present it, worrying about the other project we have neglected while working on the presentation, and then worry about going shopping for dinner while catching up on that project.

And of course we wake up in the middle of the night, worrying about how little time we are going to have for all the things we need to do the following day. Or, perhaps, we feel regret about how little time we spent on the important things the day before, how distracted we were during the school run, how little we could focus on the presentation and project work.

If only we had more time, maybe things would be different.

The actual problem, of course, is staring us in the face. We are spending half of the limited time we have for a thing worrying about a completely different thing.

You may only have half an hour on the school run, but if you’re spending half of that watching the road, and the other half worrying about the presentation you’re going to work on next, there’s very little time to hear the kids telling you what they’re excited about today.

And it’s not like those fifteen minutes you’ve “spent” on the presentation during the school run have got you a head start. You’ve spent the time worrying, and you probably have to spend another five minutes calming down again before you start. And even worse, you spend half of that hour you’ve allocated worrying about actually delivering the presentation.

So it goes, the whole day. You allocate an hour, but spend less than half of it on the thing you’ve allocated it to. Over and over.

It’s exhausting, demoralising, chronic. But it’s not a lack of time.

It’s a lack of presence.

To be completely present on a task means to focus all of our attention on it. It means we can use all the time we have set aside on the actual task. But typically we don’t. We spend half of our time lost in the future, and the other half is part spent in the past, addressing the anxiety we built up anticipating this moment.

Presence is the antidote to a perceived lack of time. It’s like the old joke about meditation, where you should meditate for at least an hour a day, unless you don’t have time, in which case you should meditate for two hours.

Here’s the thing: when you’re suffering from a lack of time due to a lack of presence, being more present can create more time. This is what flow does, it creates time. The hour you set aside to finish that presentation suddenly feels like two hours, because what you’re used to “an hour” feeling like is actually just half an hour. This bears repeating:

Presence can create time.

If you need convincing, notice how easy it is to find hours to spend on Instagram or TikTok. Those platforms hack your attention to force complete presence (much like slot machines, variable reward is like superglue for your presence). This is actually why, when we feel like we have no time, when we are overwhelmed, we find these platforms so helpful. For all the harm they cause, they do provide us with a limitless source of presence.

Now that’s all well and good, but how do we harness this ability to be present for ourselves, for the experiences we want, rather than down on TikTok’s attention farm?

The first answer is the one you don’t want to hear: spend a few years meditating. Meditation is, in many ways, a gym for your presence muscle. There are many benefits to meditation, many techniques, but they all require and hence strengthen a form of presence.

But let’s say you can’t go back in time and tell yourself to start meditating. What else can you do?

I have been experimenting with a rather drastic approach to encourage myself to be present, but before I get to that, let’s start with a game:

What time is it right now? Go ahead and find out, I’ll wait.

Got it? Okay, my assertion is that this was not a difficult thing for you to find out. I’m going to guess that, for almost all of you, the answer was already staring you in the face, on the same surface you’re reading these words from. A smaller number might have had to glance to a wrist or a wall, or call out into the air “smart speaker, what time is it?”. Maybe a few of you called through to a friend or colleague to ask.

I will guarantee that nobody was unable to answer the question.

Think about that. You know, to within a staggering level of accuracy, exactly how far round in its daily rotation the earth currently is. You know when the sun will set. You know how long it is till dinner time, how long till you need to go to bed. You know how many minutes you have till Strictly comes on, or how many days are left till the weekend. Depending on how you’re reading this, you may have information that not even I have access to right now: how long you have left before you reach the end of this article.

You know what time it is. And I’m going to suggest that this is the worst possible thing you could know in terms of your ability to be present.

You know how long you have to wait before you can start on that presentation, then how long you have to wait before you can deliver it, which also tells you how long you have to wait before you can get back to that project. You know how long you have to wait before you can get out to the bus, to the shops, then to dinner, and then to bed.

Each of these pieces of information, available for you to update with millisecond accuracy at any time, utterly destroys your ability to be present. Glance at your watch, right now, and tell me there’s not a pang of concern about how long this article is taking to read. You have other stuff you need to be doing, dammit. Important stuff!

That feeling: the feeling that there is important stuff which you can’t get to yet, is the source of your sense of time scarcity. It’s the result of constantly living in the future, facilitated by your constant access to how long it is till that future arrives.

Knowing how long you have left to be present immediately checks you out of the present.

So the solution? The experiment I’m conducting?

Replace the clocks with alarms.

Because let’s be real: you still have to have things done by a certain time. You can’t just lose yourself on the school run, being so present with the kids that you go and get ice cream before eventually turning up half way through period three. I mean that sounds quite awesome to me actually, but you get my point.

So you still need to know the time, but you don’t need to know it all the time.

For example. If you know you need to leave for school at 7:50am, you’ll probably start checking the time at 7:40am so you can ensure everyone gets shoes on, gets in the car, and is ready to leave on time.

How would that look if, instead, you set two alarms: one for 7:40, the other for 7:50? “Is it time to leave yet?” becomes a question you don’t even need to ask. You can be completely present on whatever until that first alarm goes off.

What about the work on the presentation? Well, the alarm goes off when you need to start, and then another goes off maybe ten minutes before the presentation. Between those alarms? No checking the clock, just complete focus on the task till the alarm goes off. If you feel like you might want a “ten minute warning” so you know when you need to wrap things up? That’s another alarm.

The key here is to start noticing how often you check the time, and how many of these checks actually give you useful information (“You have ten minutes left, start wrapping up”), and how many give you harmful information (“OMG, remember all those other things you still need to get to after you finish this?”), and set alarms for the former so you can stop having an excuse to trigger the latter.

It also only works if you do your best to remove all ambient sources of time. Get rid of the clocks where you work, hide the menu bar on your computer, and (my favourite), if you have an Apple Watch, switch to a watch face that uses numerals that you can’t read (I’m partial to Urdu, myself).

Having been giving this a go for the last week or so, I can report that it’s surprisingly effective (this article is proof). My recommendation is to set more alarms than you think might be needed, and to set them ad-hoc (so before you start the task, consider how long you’ll need to wrap up before the next thing, how much of a break you need between this and that, whether you want any check-ins during the time and so on). The goal is to think of everything you can which would cause you to check your watch, and set an alarm for it instead.

And no, this isn’t just pomodoro: the other key is that these are alarms, not timers. You shouldn’t be able to glance at a timer and see that you have five minutes left. You just wait for the alarm.

Give it a go, let me know what you find out, and remember: if you’re feeling short of time, know that we’re all short of time. The important thing is that we get to choose what to do with the time we have. Spending half of that time chronically worrying about the future seems like a poor choice.

And who has enough time for poor choices?

Being laid off has been weird, and has actually got me thinking a lot about grief. Both can arrive suddenly, unbidden, and you have very little control over either of them.

Also, both can be paired with an odd sort of limbo period, where you’re pretty certain what’s going to happen, but it hasn’t happened yet, and so you end up trying to get on with things even though there’s this ominous cloud over everything.

And then it happens, and the actual happening is surprisingly brief.

And then comes the rest of your life. And actually, for me, one of the hardest bits of that, in all cases, has been just telling people. Because when you tell people something like this, they almost all pour on the empathy.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it. I’m not sure I’d know what else to suggest you do. But the net result is that I end up being the one doing the reassuring, almost helping the other person through my own grief.

Yes, the family are doing okay. No, there’s no urgency yet to sort out what happens next (whether clearing the house or finding a job).

And ultimately, yes, I’m fine. Actually, honestly, better now than I was in the lead up to everything. There’s a huge amount of relief in finally knowing, rather than it just being a pending thing.

So yes, I’m fine.

But sometimes I’m not fine with being fine.

How can I be fine with the world how it is right now? How can things be okay when I’ve just lost my job and am in no rush to get another just yet?

How can I be fine?

How can I not feel guilty that I’m not using my time to make the world a better place? How can I just be content with what I have and not worried about what happens when the money runs out?

How can I be okay when there’s so much that’s not okay? How can I accept that I’m a flawed human when so many people rely on me not being flawed? People that I love, that I want to support and care for. How can I be okay with being anything less than perfect for them?

How is “fine” anything other than very not fine?

And the reality is that, until I’m fine with all that, I won’t be fine.

But I’m fine. And that’s how I can start the work of addressing all that.

If I wasn’t fine, I’d have no hope of even starting.

So yeah, I’m fine thanks. How are you?

One of the best things about publishing stuff online is that you get feedback. It can also be one of the worst things, but let’s focus on the positive for the moment.

A particularly resonant piece of feedback that I have received more than once is that I write the way I talk. I’m never sure if this is a backhanded compliment, to be honest, but I do like to think that I have a strong tone of voice on here. Certainly, when reviewing some old articles recently, it’s clear that my older articles sound very much like a younger me.

Anyway, on the train back from London last week, it occurred to me that I could add something new to the site: audio versions of the articles. Not some crazy AI generated voice version, but actually me, speaking into a mic. Having tried this out on a few articles on the site over the weekend, I can see that while my writing might sound like me, there’s definitely some nuance in how I want to say things that doesn’t quite make it from the voice in my head to the words on the screen.

Maybe speaking things out loud will help to bridge that gap.

So I’ve bought a fancy mic, and all things going according to plan, you should see a simple “play” button at the top of this page. I intend to go back and add audio to a bunch of recent articles, and once there’s a few there, will perhaps push the audio feed into some of the podcast platforms.

Yes, maybe this means I can say “I have a podcast”, but please don’t hold it against me.

And if you want to provide feedback of your own, (on this, or anything else, really), please see the about page for ways to get in touch.

I recently updated the articles list, and added a counter to the link at the bottom. Which, as I draft this post, shows a count of 99.

So this is the 100th post on this site. Big news!

Except of course it’s not. Not really. Not all my writing is on this site. I still have a bunch of “imported” articles sitting in the wings, retrieved from older versions of this site, some dating back longer than I care to admit. Many more are more dated than old, if you know what I mean.

I read recently that if you’re not embarrassed by your old work, you haven’t really grown, which in many ways means I must have grown quite a lot in the last couple of decades. I mentioned on my updated about page that I have been writing online since the last century, and it’s true. My first website was published back in 1998, on some free space that came along with my first dial up connection from Freeserve. I can’t even remember how I put it together, likely on some bootleg copy of Dreamweaver, which would have been brand new software at the time.

That original site was named after the first four letters of our family car’s registration plate - about the only thing that came to mind when we were asked for a username and found out that Barrett had already been taken. Turns out there’s still some remnants of it on the Wayback Machine, albeit from a couple of years later.

Having had a quick revisit of that site, some of it is definitely, toe-curlingly cringe (as I believe the kids call it). Some of it is familiar, though: Links to my first few commercial web projects (sites for local bed and breakfasts, and one for a local hip hop label), some essays that I had written, and a page of “rantings” that was clearly a blog before that term had been invented.

Halting, blustering, simultaneously full of my own importance and crushingly shy. Some things change, some things remain the same.

And so here I am, still bashing keys and making marks on a screen, hoping someone is reading and taking some sort of enjoyment from all this. Even if it turns out to just be me, some twenty plus years later.

I have written before about how critical it is to be clear on what we mean when we say certain things. Today, I would like to be clear on what I mean when I say “productivity”.

Productivity is often discussed in terms of business or commercial contexts: how to squeeze those extra drops of productivity out of your day so you can ace those TPS reports while also landing your own personal best on your marathon time. While that can certainly be an example of productivity, it can also be a path to burnout.

See, “productivity” is really just the name of a measurement. Taken literally (and I love taking things literally when looking to find clarity), it is simply a measure of “productive activity”.

Activity seems easy enough to understand: it’s the sum of actions taken in a particular time. Hopefully nothing controversial there.

But what does it mean for activity to be “productive”? Again, be literal: what is being produced?

In your boss’s mind, it may well be “value for the company”, specifically those TPS reports, or a new feature, or some bug fixes, or a strategy document. Those are all “products”. And so in a work perspective, those could be good examples of intended products.

There are also unintended products. You might be producing conflict with your activity. Or bugs. Or GDPR nightmares. These are also products, but it would be hard to argue that you’ve been “productive” by introducing a security hole that leaked your entire customer database.

So let’s refine this: we care about measuring activity that leads to intended products.

Is that enough to give us a definition? Let’s see if it fits:

Productivity is a measure of how successful our activities have been in outputting intended products.

There’s still something not quite right about this. I like being literal, but “product” feels off here. When I think about “product” I think about little packaged things. This is a very commercial definition, and actually quite limiting. There are so many things we “produce”, and some aren’t even really “things” at all. Can we broaden our thinking here to make this more universally applicable?

I like to reach into the world of stage magic, here: magicians often talk of producing an “effect”, like make a card disappear, or making a rabbit appear from a hat. In these cases, what is being produced is the “effect” on the audience, as much as it is the rabbit.

I prefer this idea of thinking of our productions in terms of the “effect” we have on the world around us. To channel Steve Jobs, what we’re really producing is our “dent in the universe”.

So let’s revise the definition:

Productivity is a measure of how successful our activities have been in producing intended effects.

This feels much more workable. It absolutely satisfies those TPS reports and that marathon personal best as being “high productivity”, but it also introduces one critical consideration: Intention.

Presumably your boss’s intentions at least somewhat align with yours (they want those TPS reports, you want to get paid). But the marathon? Are you doing that because you intended to? Or because you were trying to live up to someone else’s expectations?

Conversely, if your intention is to produce a completed series rewatch of Stranger Things, then binging on Netflix over the weekend absolutely counts as being productive. And this is not a bug, this is a feature.

See, all these “productivity” tools are just that, tools. You might watch a bunch of YouTube videos about being super efficient with a hammer, or read some articles about getting really skilled at wielding a to-do list, but none of these can really tell you what you intend to do with those tools.

So the really key part of all of this, and without which “productivity” becomes just another treadmill, is to put in the work to get really clear on your intentions.

Because you have more control over that to-do list than you think. Sure, you might not be able to say “no” to those TPS reports that you’re stuck with compiling, but you (hopefully) don’t live at work. And the tools that work on your to-do list in your job also work on your to-do list for the rest of your life too.

And no, that doesn’t mean you have to treat your downtime like “work”. That’s why the admission of that Stranger Things binge to the definition of “productivity” is absolutely a feature. However, if we’re not able to be intentional with our lives, just like at work, you can guarantee there are plenty of people who are ready to fill up our to-do lists with their intentions. As Hank Green points out, nobody is bragging about starting their second hour on TikTok.

But start our second hour we do. And even if you feel like you have very little time in your life that you truly have control over, have any say over, I can almost guarantee that that first hour on TikTok was something you seemed to have complete control over.

Except you didn’t. TikTok did. It took control and convinced you that you were treating yourself to choose to do that for you. It felt like a well earned “break”. And that’s where the “productivity” tools can help us avoid this trap of spending our break times working on someone else’s farm.

What if we spent some time to come up with a few things we actually want to do, whether it’s finishing that book, writing that article, painting that picture, going for that hike, lying in bed, whatever it is. Just took five minutes and wrote a list.

Then what if we reviewed all that “productivity” stuff and applied it to our list, instead of someone else’s.

Because there’s my definition, what I mean when I talk about productivity: taking a few minutes to decide what you want, right now, and then applying some activity to produce it.