The Art of Time-Shifting
The tagline of this website is “Tools for a productive creative life.” I included the word “productive” to emphasize the importance of finishing and sharing your creative work. But the word “productive” also conjures the concept of “productivity,” a buzzword that comes with baggage, including an inherent emphasis on time and time management.
Most of our discussion about time is focused on finding time, managing time, and measuring the outputs of our investments of time. I have written about these subjects. My recent article Drops in the Bucket: Four Ideas on How to Make Progress on Your Creative Projects focused on using a “No List” to free up time, using the Eisenhower Decision Matrix to prioritize commitments, using time blocking to ensure that you have time for your creative work sessions, and using self-imposed deadlines to establish a cadence of completion for your projects.
Since I wrote that article, I’ve reframed the way I think about finding time for creative work: I now prefer the phrase “making time” instead of “finding time”—a change in terminology that emphasizes the importance of choice. There’s never enough time for everything we want to do, or believe we must do. If you want to have time for your creative work, you must make it a priority. But making time is only one part of integrating your creative work into day-to-day life. The other part is shifting the rhythm of your thought from the measured, standardized rhythm of daily existence to the unmeasured, irregular rhythms of the creative mind.
Clock-Time, Psychological Time, and Sacred Time
What is time? Most definitions of time are a variation of what’s commonly called “clock-time”: the continued progression of events from the past to the present to the future. But there’s another concept of time we all experience daily, “psychological time,” which is your perception of time. Psychological time is malleable—it speeds up and slows down as your experiences and emotions change. There’s also a third kind of time (or more accurately, timelessness) that we sometimes experience through meditation, prayer, art, and other spiritual practices. This is sacred time.
But we primarily live in clock time: the 24 hour day, the 60 minute hour, and the 60 second minute. Clocks impose temporal order, which inevitably leads to civic order, and ultimately a more ordered personal life. We use clock-time to mark the seasons, religious observance, the holidays, the work week, and the workday. Our days are quantified and measured, as is what we make of our days—the hours we’re paid for or bill, and the work we produce.
It’s very difficult to be creative on the clock, when you’re measuring your time and productivity, which isn’t to say that we need large blocks of time or open-ended time to be creative. What we need is the ability to shift out of the mindset of measured time into one of unmeasured time. This often involves stepping out of time—slowing down, focusing, and then slipping into flow states—which often include periods of very purposeful, rapid movement. It’s productivity decoupled from our normal attachment to time, the opposite of being busy.
The following two images characterize the difference between these two states. You’re probably familiar with this scene from Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 classic Modern Times:
Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin (1936)
Chaplin’s Little Tramp has a job tightening bolts on an assembly line. It’s mind-numbing work. The supervisor orders the controller to speed up the conveyor belt. The Little Tramp goes berserk trying to keep up and is eventually swallowed by the cogs of the machine. (This scene is hilariously echoed by Lucille Ball in the chocolate factory episode.)
In contrast, take a moment to savor the way David Hockney conveys rhythm in his beautiful painting Garrowby Hill:
Garrowby Hill, David Hockney (1998)
Instead of the measured, ceaseless time of the assembly line, we experience the flowing descent of a road down the hill to the valley below. The painting has rhythm, but it’s not the steady beat of standard time. It’s a more natural, flowing rhythm. Time speeds up and slows down. Your eye moves from the tight, steep, fast curves of the road in the foreground to the open, rolling curves of the roadway in the background, where your attention then lingers on the geometric shapes of the cultivated fields. There’s movement, but it changes pace and flows. Like nature does, like our emotions do.
The Real Meaning of Busy-Bragging
Busy-bragging is rampant in our culture. Complaining about how busy you are is a sign of social status. Being busy implies that there’s an overwhelming demand for your expertise, insight, and work. It’s shorthand for “I’m important.” But we aren't always busy-bragging to impress others. Sometimes we’re busy because we aren’t able to prioritize, to say No, to protect the time we need for our inner life. We’re busy-bragging to convince ourselves that the sacrifices we’re making to keep pace with our overfilled schedules are worth it.
The philosopher Jacob Needlman points out that being busy isn’t about the length of your to-do list—it's about always being in a hurry. In other words, constantly being “busy” is a byproduct of your relationship with time. When you’re in a hurry, you’re playing out the thoughts that are coming into your mind without your permission. You’re reacting, not acting with intention.
For many of us, when we say we’re busy, we’re reacting to obligations imposed on us by others. We’re working in lockstep with external priorities and deadlines. We’re busy because we are overly focused on the economic and social value of our output.
Our natural response to the pressure we feel is to speed up. We feel our attention constantly tripping forward: what’s next, what’s next, what’s next? But speeding up as a reaction isn’t the same as moving fast with purpose
While using the 86,400 atomic seconds that constitute a day wisely and productively are important, productivity can’t be the only way we measure our life. Time can also be measured qualitatively. This distinction becomes particularly important as we think about and evaluate how we use the time we’ve set aside for creative work.
Time-Shifting
Dr. Stephan Rechtschaffen’s book Time Shifting introduces a way of thinking about time that’s particularly useful for creative work. Time-shifting isn’t about moving around the blocks on your calendar—it’s about learning how to shift between different rhythms of time.
Rechtschaffen begins by introducing the concept of “entrainment,” the tendency of moving things to fall into synchronization with each other. Everything that pulses, that has a rhythm, from molecules to butterfly wings to stars, tends to entrain. It’s also true of people. As the rhythm of modern society has increased, the pace of our lives has increased. We are moving faster and faster, in unison, in sync with clock-time.
Time-shifting is the conscious decoupling/coupling from the prevailing rhythm of the moment. It’s not just slowing down; it’s about being conscious of the pace and rhythm of the moment and slowing down or speeding up as appropriate. The goal is to change “the focus of our attention, and thus our perception.” First, you focus on becoming aware of the present moment. Next, you focus on sensing the particular rhythm and flow of the moment. Finally, you decide whether to decouple with the rhythm of the moment or entrain with it. This seemingly simple process takes conscious effort.
Rechtschaffen notes that most of the time we are decoupling from the prevailing fast-paced rhythms of modern life, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes we are called upon to speed up to meet the demands of a particular situation--the time-shifting technique works both ways.
The easiest way to time-shift is through routines and rituals. For some, meditation is an effective way of becoming aware of the present moment. For others, it’s a walk outside or listening to calming sounds. Even something as simple as a reminder on your phone can serve as a cue to take a few moments to breathe and focus on the rhythm of the present moment.
Time-shifting is a powerful tool for transitioning to your creative work. Too often, we begin our creative work while we are still entrained to the rhythms of daily life, where a heightened awareness of time, a propensity for quick judgement, and a focus on the shortest route to completion serve us well. But this is not the right mindset for creative work. Creative work requires us to expand the moment, to slow down, step away from our everyday notions of productivity, and follow the ebb and flow of the wandering mind. Creativity begins in reverie—the relaxed, pleasant wandering of thought that is in fact the default state of our mind. Decoupling from the world of measured time and quantified productivity isn’t dropping out, it’s returning home to the relaxed, pleasant state of conscious curiosity that is in fact our default state of being.