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?