It’s About Time

Shouldn’t you start advocating for longer-term goals?

Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still by John Martin, 1816 (public domain - Wikimedia Commons)

“I wasted time and now time doth waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes.”

— William Shakespeare, c. 1595

You’re in a hurry, I get it.

You want the three-bullet memo. Could this meeting have been an email? Could this email have been a Slack? Could this Slack have been telepathy?

You have 1,001 things to do — and you need to check your various feeds for updates, replies that need replies, and DMs — a newsletter? Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Time is part of our modern lexicon: time travel, time zones, time enough at last, time warp, etc.

But it’s also how the industrial world measures its worth and dispenses rewards: time clock, overtime, time-and-a-half, downtime, time off.

“Tardiness is next to wickedness in a society relentless in its consumption of time as both a good and a service—as tweet and Instagram, film clip and sound bite, as sporting event…