A New Kind Of Time

“Embracing creaturely limits can not only lower our blood pressure, but remind us that God created us as humans, not machines.”

Ben Dockery | Est. 5-6 minutes

A New Kind of Time

There is a time for everything, according to Ecclesiastes 3, but there is not enough time for everything. Peter Drucker advises leaders to ‘know thy time,’ which begins with a recorded examination of where one’s time goes. This article invites you to think with us for a few minutes about the knotty issue of time management and God’s design for finite creatures. 

Time stands as the non-renewable, most-scarce-resource for leaders. Not only is it inelastic, but it is equally distributed. Unlike talent or money or opportunity, everyone gets an identical portion of daily time and it can’t be banked for the future or traded for another commodity. You have all the time there is today; no one has more or less than you, which invites all of us to consider our time more closely.

Dimension 1: Approaches to Time

People approach time differntly. First, you can think in very practical terms for work life. There is ‘on time’ (punctuality) and then there is ‘five-minutes-early-is-ten-minutes-late’ time (OCD punctuality). Know thy time and thy boss, right? 

Know thy culture too. Cultural assumptions of time often surface when monochronic and polychronic cultures  encounter misunderstandings. Edgar Schein, an organizational culture guru, tells the story of a German executive who diligently shows up with a minute-by-minute agenda for a business meeting with a group of Brazilian leaders. As he proceeds to start the meeting ‘on time’ and outlines the schedule, he is essentially laughed out of the room. Cultures, local and national, approach time differently.

Another distinction is less practical and philosophical:  chronos time and kairos time. Chronos time is quantitative or sequenced: Meet me at Starbucks at 3pm for half an hour. Kairos time (which is used more regularly in the New Testament) relates to life moments or seasons: Jesus came in the fullness of time. Again, culture matters here. Westerners tend to operate in a chronos world and rarely stop to think about how we might reunite these two distinct ways of being in the world. 

The fact that we can reference an exact time like 3pm is a massive historical assumption. Next, we’ll take a quick tour of history to see how the age we live in shapes our view of time and ourselves. 

Dimension 2: From Approaching Time to Keeping Time

Do you know how you keep time? Ancient playwright, Plautus, complained that the gods confounded humans by allowing them to distinguish between hours. Specifically, he lodged a complaint against the need to wait until a certain ‘time of day’ before eating dinner. He remarks, “when I was a boy, my belly was my sundial.” (Likely satire aimed to poke those resistant to using the new technology of a sundial. Those technophobes pre-dated the Luddites by 2000yrs).

Kelly Kapic offers a brief history of “timekeeping” in his book You are Only Human. He explains that, for millennia. people understood time as “contextual,” or in reference to the material world (what we see, experience, and feel). This means time was associated with sun and moon; evening quiet and morning cockcrow; falling leaves or melting snow. Eventually, sundials were replaced by mechanical clocks - beginning in large cities in the thirteenth century - and time became abstract and detached from the world. Today, this “noncontextual” time, or clock time, frames our reality and even our morality. 

We wear time on our wrist and display it on our phones despite our physical context. As a result, people talk of ‘wasting time’, ‘spending time’, and ‘managing time’ with moral overtones. Clock time produces the values of speed, efficiency, and production (mechanistic values), which override the values of relationship, reflection, and presence (human values). The implicit  goal is to overcome the limits of time.

George Woodcock claims that the clock is the key machine of the machine age that is dictating the habits of humankind. He laments, “Men (in factories) actually became like clocks, acting with a repetitive regularity which had no resemblance to the rhythmic life of a natural being.” 

Lament turns into a jeremiad for Woodcock, “Quantity rather than quality becomes the criterion, the enjoyment is taken out of work itself, and the worker in his turn becomes a ‘clockwatcher’, concerned only when he will be able to escape to the scanty and monotonous leisure of industrial society, in which he ‘kills time’ by cramming in as much time-scheduled and mechanised enjoyment of cinema, radio, and newspapers as his wage packet and his tiredness allow.” (Read more in his 1944 essay, The Tyranny of the Clock).

Ultimately, Kapic and Woodcock are gesturing toward the distinction between humans and machines. Clock time serves machines extremely well, but the expectation that humans can and should be doing something every waking moment raises levels of anxiety and productivity shame, especially for creatives. 

Timekeeping quietly narrates our view of the world. Embracing creaturely limits can not only lower our blood pressure, but remind us that God created us as humans, not machines.

Dimension 3: From Timekeeping to Time-Tracking

Drucker first made the argument that effective executives must know and track their time in the same way industrial economies learned to vigorously track manual labor activities to improve operations. An entire industry was spawned to systematically improve time-use. Automated tools track professionals’ use of time to help prioritize, eliminate low-value activities, and increase time discipline. It’s big money. We have inherited these insights…and burdens. 

One famous artifact of this executive effort is William Oncken’s, Who’s Got the Monkey article. He outlines three time-takers for leaders: boss-imposed time, system-imposed time (peers), and self-imposed time (subordinates and discretionary time). He reveals a way to keep self-imposed time more effectively, which helps leaders prioritize.

Their advice remains: Don’t assume you know where you are investing your time—track it. See where your discretionary time has become in-discretionary time. Turn the dials as needed for the good of the organization you serve and your family or friends. 

These practices aid the exercise of stewarding God’s gift of time. However, it can slide into the mechanistic value shifts described above where production suprasses presence.

A counter-practice is baked into the architecture of time that can rework your relationship with it.

Dimension 4: Sabbath-time

Rabbi Abraham Heschel suggests the Bible is more concerned with time (history) than with space (geography) because “it is not the thing that lends significance to a moment, it is the moment that lends significance to things.” 

Heschel calls Judaism a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. While this borders on abstraction, he concretizes his words in the idea of Sabbath. He explains that Sabbath is a central Jewish ritual that forms the architecture of time - a dimension we can’t see. It’s like a new kind of time that gives shape to the other six days and celebrates time and creation itself, instead of simply the results of creation.

Sabbath-time, established by God’s ceasing in creation and practiced by Jesus in his earthly life, reminds us our heavenly Father works when we don’t. 

Sabbath restores context to time. 

Sabbath pronounces our limits loudly and regularly. 

Sabbath fosters reflection and relationship. 

Sabbath resets the goodness of the six-day work week.

Sabbath descales the hidden value assumptions clock-time hands us. 

Sabbath resurfaces our humanity even when our production ceases.

As time marches on, let it remind you that you are a dependent creature, not an independent creator. As you manage your time, remember Drucker is still right: effective executives will, “know thy time,” but wise leaders will also know the God of time and the invitation to Sabbath rest.

© Ben Dockery | This article was first published in Lakelight Monthly, March 2023 Edition

For Suggestions on how to implement the Sabbath, check out our book suggestions for Spiritual Formation.