Time is a curious companion these days. We feel too busy and not nearly busy enough. The minutes feel like weeks while the days fly past undifferentiated. In pandemic time, every day is Wednesday and every night is Friday.
But there’s one aspect of the relationship with time that few of us have mastered yet: duration. Anybody can live with a blackout for a few hours or even a night: when you’re without power for a few days, shit gets real. The battle that we all rallied for in the first couple of weeks has now become a siege. And in a siege, one’s perception of time matters a great deal.
On a recent happy hour call an industry colleague told us how much better her life had become once she accepted the long view: that stay at home, social distancing, restricted offices and no conferences would be the norm for at least six months, likely longer. Say what? Yes, that’s right: accepting the long term scenario allows you to shut off the destructive focus on How many more days or weeks? It allows us to say This is our new reality: let’s settle in and be great at it.
Stopping the Clock breaks the tyranny of the calendar. It allows us to start living again in the present… to focus on the next hour. We can now start visualizing what productivity and joy and excellence look like in our altered world. Whether you spend 24 hours in your apartment on Zoom or running between client meetings at CES, it's still a day in your life.
We have only now. Stopping the Clock let's us make the most of it.
