The Unforgiving Minute
Time waits for no one
“If ever, my dear Hawthorne, we shall sit down in Paradise in some little shady corner by ourselves…then O, my dear fellow mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse all of the things manifold which now so much distress us.”
— From a letter from Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, summer 1851
From the prosaic to the poetic, mankind has frequently marveled about the essence of time.
We glimpse into the outer reaches of the universe, surpassing galaxy after galaxy as we grapple with the space-time continuum; we strain our eyes as we hunch over spreadsheets, determining the worth of an hour or the waste of a minute.
Time consumes us as we consume time.
The concept is a manmade one, of course — one that we don’t question as we find ourselves slaves to it.
Wisdom from Walden to Wellesley
Henry David Thoreau escaped the daily grind of the world and discovered the true nature of time as he spent a year alone in the woods at Walden Pond. As he described in Walden (1845):
“My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that “for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day.””
James Keddie lived in Wellesley, Massachusetts, about 13 miles due south of Walden Pond. He was Vice President in charge of the Boston branch of the Bellows-Reeve publishing house, where he was able to do something he loved: sell books.
[He also founded the Speckled Band of Boston, a Sherlock Holmes society of which I’ve been a member for over 30 years — yes, that explains my signature in every issue of my newsletter.]
Keddie’s company published his own reflections in 1936 in a book called Shady Corner in Paradise, in which he too reflected on time — in a way more suited to a salesman than the farmer-writer that was Thoreau.
In his essay on time (“The Unforgiving Minute”), he manages to capture our modern fixation on productivity, encourages the wiser use of our time, and walks us through the classic AIDA structure for sales:
One of the most successful men in the publishing business in this country used to say (probably does so now): “Loss of time is the chief cause of failure in business.”
Since we do not believe in failure we might adapt the quotation to our business thus: “Loss of time is the chief cause of limited success in our work.”
And it is.
By loss of time one does not altogether mean time spent elsewhere than in the field during work hours. We cannot take orders at a matinee, of course; but when we play truant we know we are doing it and we know we are losing time. We therefore know the means of correcting this particular kind of extravagance with our chief asset — Time.
Far more insidious than the matinee virus is the ten-minutes-late-in-the-morning bacillus; and the microbe of took-too-long-for-lunch is one of the hardest to isolate. But even so, there are germs still more deadly. Sometimes one who works hardest wastes most time. Consciously wasted time can be corrected, even if it has become a habit, by an effort of will. Unconsciously wasted time can only be offset when detected; and only detected by constant and careful self-analysis.
If you are not keeping your work planned well ahead, you are wasting time.
If you are calling on Prospects without first finding out every fact about them essential to your business, you are wasting time.
If you are working yourself entirely out of one assignment before you begin lining up the next, you are wasting time.
If you are “burning up territory” and moving from town to town, or from assignment to assignment before your territory is exhausted, you are wasting time.
If you are trying to force the issue with your prospects by starting to win Interest before you have Attention, you are wasting time.
If you are trying to get Desire before you have won Interest, you are wasting time.
If you are trying to get Action before you have won Desire, you are wasting time.
If you are trying to get orders by depending upon the inspiration of the moment for your Sales Talks, instead of having them carefully prepared, you are wasting time.
If you are making Sales Talks, each one of which touches upon several of the lines of interest instead of having a clean cut and entirely separate Sales Talk for each one of them, you are wasting time.
If each Sales Talk does not end with a positive suggestion for Action by a presentation of the order blank, you are wasting time. A Sales Talk which does not explode in a definite suggestion for Action is a “dud,” pointless and useless!
If you have a prospect who should be sold and you leave before you have worked along each of the “lines,” you are wasting time.
If you are looking for “good territory,” “favorable circumstances,” “nice prospects,” etc., you are wasting time.
“A minute has no negative qualities. It can be made to yield something but not nothing. Every minute the clock ticks off yields something beneficial or something detrimental.”
How are you using the time that’s been given to you? Are you wasting it, watching it count down, honing it to work to your advantage, or multiplying it with your effectiveness?
There’s only so much time left.
Captain Clock
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, investment opportunity, Tinder hookup, and interest rate—its value measured not by its texture or its substance but by the speed of its delivery. (Lapham’s Quarterly)
Time to Stop
We all make to-do lists. Here’s an alternative: make a stop-doing list. Things that you can effectively move off of your already busy schedule. Consider things you can eliminate, delegate, or automate. Why? Because your time and energy are limited, busy is not the same as productive, it builds clarity and confidence, it makes space for strategic thinking, creativity, and better decision-making, and it prevents burnout. (SmartBrief)
In her 1958 book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt warned that we were already well along the path of moving from finding meaning in our work to being cogs focused on productivity:
“The endlessness of the laboring process is guaranteed by the ever-recurrent needs of consumption; the endlessness of production can be assured only if its products lose their use character and become more and more objects of consumption, or if, to put it another way, the rate of use is so tremendously accelerated that the objective difference between use and consumption, between the relative durability of use objects and the swift coming and going of consumer goods, dwindles to insignificance.”
It is a powerful reminder to stop and ask ourselves what is the balance between labor, work, and action in our lives today?
There’s so much to learn,
In case you didn’t know, this interest in Sherlock Holmes has led to me hosting two podcasts: and . I’m serious.