Time is your only true Social Sector asset

Do you have a second? What is the true value of time? Time is your only non-renewable and finite resource. Assets, learning, space, you can always regain. Once time gone, there is no way to get it back. 

In recent years as my life has become more full with a growing family and career , time has become an increasingly  scarce resource. This has created a scarcity mindset around days, hours, and minutes that has put me into a reactive state and left me with a feeling that there was never enough time. It seemed like there was never enough time to work on and achieve my Social Sector mission. Never enough time to do the things I want to experience outside of work.  This was pressure that I put on myself and it created physical and mental pain for me and a feeling of scarcity that leaked into my mindset and actions toward myself and others. 

---

How are you? “Busy, very busy… totally slammed.” That is the standard call-and-response in so many Social Sector offices in America and around the world. Everyone wants to be seen as important, and so project an image that they are maxed and they are absolutely essential to the clean functioning of their organization. 

Here is a a better answer that we can use once we understand time and priorities: “I’ve got my planning for the year/month/week in place and I’m taking time and focusing on what matters. I am getting things done and spending time on the big picture. I’ve got plenty of time because I’ve let extraneous things fall away. I have abundant time because I know how to focus on the things that matter, and studiously avoid the rest.” 

What systems can we use to move toward that better answer? I’ve assembled some frameworks below that help me tackle the time scarcity illusion, and allows me to move toward that better answer sketched out above:

Mindset: How to think about time
There is enough time if you use it well - There is more than enough time for everything that has to happen if we use time well. The concept of ‘true time vs. trash time’ helps us know if we are using time well. True time is learning, working, interacting with family, training your body and mind, or recharging from those good efforts. Trash time is the time that you waste on social media, excessive zoning out without doing something to recover, sitting in front of your computer pretending to work when you are too exhausted to make progress. 
Make a list of true time ‘to do’ and trash time ‘not to do list’. Use the list to switch back to true time pursuits. 
Time is constructed - Time is a way to organize people interacting with each other. We need it and it helps the social machine run. But remember that we created the concept of time, and we can form it to our own designed life. We experience that moment in whatever way we decide. 
Past and future are imagined, only now is real - Time is a series of individual moments made up of only this present time that you are reading these words. The past does not exist anymore. The future has not yet happened. Time is a series of present moments that we can use to make the right choice and move toward as much true time as possible. 

Strategy: Building a time focused plan
​Plan your ideal day and week - Take a few minutes at the beginning of each week to map out the progression of the coming 7 days. My process includes cataloging those specifics t I’m thinking about and working on for that week. What time blocks can we allocate to specific things in that week to allow for pure focus and deep work?

Plan your year - What time blocks in the year can we allocate toward advancing our Social Sector impact, but also include recovery from that work? 

Focus on the moment - In each of the blocks for the year, week and day, figure out how to use each moment as an opportunity to work toward the overarching goal. 

Focus on  3 big wins (day, week, month, year), letting the rest go - My week planning list is perpetually over scheduled. I inevitably add more than would be humanly possible to complete in one week. This is a problem. I’m experimenting with limiting each day to 3 main things like: complete X deliverable, or call Y person. At the end of this day if we reach those three simple things, the rest still has to be done but we can feel some kind of accomplishment at having completed at least a few things. 

Delegate or delete - Look at your priorities and ask, what are the things that only I can do on this list? What can I delegate? What can I delete? 

Tactics: techniques within the strategy
Buying back time - As a frugal person and someone who values manual work and the ‘do it yourself’ ethic, I struggle with paying for things that I could do myself. But if we see time as the only finite resource then in some cases we can buy back more of it through hiring and delegation. For me that means paying for help in driving kids around, food shopping and house/workspace cleaning. Things I choose not to delegate, but that I could are: basic truck maintenance, and landscaping around the house, because it gives me satisfaction and recharge. 

Noticing moments (moments between moments) - Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll reminds us to notice the “moments between the moments”. This links back to the Buddhist concept of awareness. Increasing our awareness makes us more conscious of each moment. The awareness allows us to evaluate our actions each moment to see if we are moving toward true time while minimizing trash time. 

Low commute - If we can engineer a low-or-no commute for work, more time opens up. This is not always possible,  but when it is, we can telecommute some of the time, move closer to work and try to fit our life pursuits into a local model that minimizes time in the car or public transport. 

Batching - Put together ‘like with like’ in your weekly plan. All meetings clustered into one day. All calls on a certain time of the week. Writing and planning sessions back to back. Switching has a cost so minimizing the switch by putting similar items together in a batch creates space in your schedule. 

Putting the pieces together for you
Your own original view of time is all that matters. We each start from a different place in our relationship to time. We often feel self imposed pressure to achieve on our Social Sector goals while also building and enjoying an excellent life. Remember that time is your most important non-renewable resource, and you can change your relationship with this concept. We can use it as a tool to get what we need out of our Social Sector work and the rest of life.