There’s No Time Like The Present

Andy Jervis reflects on making use of our most precious resource; our time.

I’ve read numerous books on time management over my career in my search for greater productivity and success. And now, on holiday, I wasn’t looking for another one. But the title of Oliver Burkeman’s book, “Four Thousand Weeks“*, caught my eye on the shelf and I picked it up and flicked through the pages.

Have you ever had that experience when this simple action takes you to a paragraph that so grabs your attention that you know you have to buy this book? This was one of those moments. And Burkeman’s book turned out to be one of the most remarkable essays on time management that I’ve ever come across.

The title alludes to the average human lifespan, with 4,000 weeks equal to around 77 years. In it, Burkeman points out that traditional time-management teachings focus on how to achieve greater productivity and get more done in less time. But with such a terrifyingly short time on a planet that is bursting with wonder, he ponders the possibility that the ultimate point of all of our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder when we feel that we never have enough time. It’s a great read.

The Art of Immersion

What grabbed me as I stood in the bookshop on holiday was the author’s description of his encounter with Jennifer Roberts, who teaches art history at Harvard University. Roberts sets all her new students a simple assignment: choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, and then go and look at it for three hours straight.

Three hours focusing on one work of art. No mobiles, books, or other distractions allowed. Just you and the artist’s work.

When was the last time you spent three hours considering anything to the exclusion of all else? I’m willing to bet that the answer is probably never.

What happens if you do? Here’s what Burkeman describes when he sat looking at “Cotton Merchants in New Orleans,” a painting by Edgar Degas.

“….you spend the first forty minutes wondering what on earth you’d been thinking. You remember – how could you ever have forgotten? – that you’ve always hated art galleries…. You contemplate switching paintings, from a work that now strikes you as a self-evidently tedious choice (it shows three men, in a room, inspecting some bales of cotton) to a nearby alternative, which seems to show many tiny souls being tortured in hell. But then you’re forced to admit to yourself that making a fresh start, by picking a new painting, would be to succumb to the very impatience you’re here to learn to resist – an attempt to seize control over your experience in precisely the way you’re seeking to avoid.

And so you wait. Grumpiness gives way to fatigue, then restless irritation. Time slows and sags. You wonder if an hour has passed, but when you check your watch, you find it’s been seventeen minutes.

And then, around the eighty-minute mark, but without your noticing precisely when or how it happens, there’s a shift. You finally give up attempting to escape the discomfort of time passing so slowly, and the discomfort abates. And the Degas begins to reveal its secret details: subtle expressions of watchfulness and sadness on the faces of the three men – one of whom, you notice properly for the first time, is a black merchant in an otherwise white milieu – plus an unexplained shadow you hadn’t previously seen, as if a fourth person were lurking out of view; and a curious optical illusion that renders one of the figures either conventionally solid or transparent, like a ghost, depending on how your eyes interpret the painting’s other lines. Before long, you’re experiencing the scene in all its sensory fullness: the humidity and claustrophobia of that room in New Orleans, the creak of the floorboards, the taste of dust in the air.

The second-order change has occurred: now that you’ve abandoned your futile efforts to dictate the speed at which the experience moves, the real experience can begin.”

I’ve come across a description of this ‘second-order change’ before, in a book describing a period spent in a monastery. Is it something you’ve ever experienced?

The Bucket List Trap

Elsewhere in his book, Burkeman describes how our desire to experience everything that the world has to offer can dull our senses to the joy of total immersion in the moment. He points out that it’s not uncommon for busy people to exchange a lifetime of rushing from meeting to meeting, from deadline to deadline, for a new life in retirement of rushing from one holiday to the next, from one country to another, and then wonder why they still don’t feel fulfilled. We sometimes see this in our conversations with clients, where they have a long list of places they want to visit, but when they begin to actually achieve their “trips of a lifetime”, somehow it starts to lose its appeal. Instead of frantically chasing down your ‘bucket list’, how about stopping to spend three hours contemplating what’s in your bucket right now? Is the desire to do it all before you ‘kick the bucket’ stopping you from enjoying the real pleasures in life – time for yourself, time to understand, time to contemplate, time to live?

Embracing the Present

Of course, there is great joy to be had from travel, and Sue and I have loved some of the experiences we’ve had together. But we’ve also been amused by the number of people who seem to turn up at a stunning location, only to spend the moment lining up their selfie sticks to get the best view of themselves before calling their bestie to tell them all about the image they’ve just posted online. We’re convinced that some of them never actually look at the thing they have apparently come to see, whether it be a mountain view, a beautiful cityscape, or “Cotton Merchants in New Orleans”. But that’s ok, because they’ve recorded an image of ‘the thing’ on their smartphone to be looked at later – when they have the time.

Life speeds by all too quickly. Maybe the key to making it a deep, meaningful and enjoyable experience is not to speed up and try to do it all.

It’s to slow right down and do it well.

Andy Jervis, CFP

Chairman

* We have an affiliation with Bookshop.org. When you buy books through our store we’ll earn commission on what you buy, which will be paid to The Chesterton House Foundation. So, not only will you expand your mind, but you’ll do good too!