Finding Time: What Makes it Difficult and Why You Should do it Anyway.

Why the Optimal Path Through TRANSITION, Might Be a Less Scheduled One.

"It’s sad when someone says, 'Let's plan quality time.' There's no quality time. You want garbage time. You and your child and a bowl of Cheerios at 11 at night, when they're not even supposed to be up. The garbage is what we want." – Jerry Seinfeld.

If I've learned anything in the six months since leaving corporate America, it's that breakthroughs - the realizations that shape life, career, and our relationships, rarely show up on our calendars.

More often, they show up in the gaps. In the quiet, the solitude, in the “garbage time.”

We seem to know this is true. Most can recall a time in the last year when clarity appeared - something you realized between the flames of a campfire or mid-flight, without Wi-Fi, looking down at the clouds.

But seldom do we allow space for moments like these to occur.

We opt for structure. We try to outwork uncertainty. We optimize. We organize our time around what's most predictably productive, measurable - most likely to yield a return.

Weeks ago, I called a friend spontaneously. Successful guy with kids the same age as my own.

He didn't answer but sent a text.

"On a call," he tells me. "What's going on?"

"Nothing. Just calling to see what's going on." I sent back.

"I’ll can call you tomorrow at 10 mtn. Or Wednesday, I can do between 11:00 and 12:00. Either of those work for you?"

The procedural nature of his proposal. The scheduling of a social exchange; my response was one of indifference.

The same week, a former colleague sent me an article from New York Magazine, curious if I'd see it. "We need to catch up,” he wrote toward the bottom. “How does lunch sound? I could do May 9th at noon."

It was April 12th.

What's happened here? Are we that busy? Has time efficiency become so important, we’re willing to schedule social connection in the gaps of our Outlook calendars?

I used to operate just like this. Monday through Friday, a sequence of thirty-minute “kick-offs”, “syncs”, “updates”, and “1:1’s.”

When I left my nine to five, I had seventy-five percent of a novel written. Forty-five thousand words, written mostly in the morning, before the day's schedule - with space to think.

I assumed more time would mean more progress, more productivity. I’d have entire days at my disposal, I would schedule dedicated time to write like anything else: "A thousand words per day, twenty days… I’ll have this thing done."

But that's not what happened.

Quality and creativity didn’t show up just because they were penciled in. In fact, productivity decreased, as did quality, the whole thing seemed to resist structure.

"I cannot cause light. The most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam." Annie Dillard wrote in her 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning work, "Pilgrim on Tinker Creek", a sort of meditation on attention, solitude, and the slow unfolding of its value.

Dillard is on to something when it comes to the way we spend our days - the way we navigate life’s TRANSITIONs.

Perhaps the occurrence of breakthroughs has everything to do with the conditions we create - the extent to which we’re available, available for surprise, for what must be stumbled upon.

More to do with “being” than “doing.”

I suppose if I were reading this essay, I would think. Sounds nice. Easier said than done.

And it is. Of course, easier said than done. De-optimizing feels unproductive at first. There’s no guarantees. No assurance that a walk without your phone, or an unexpected trip with your child will yield any insight whatsoever.

But eventually it will.

In 2022, I happened across someone I now consider a dear friend. He lives in Maine, and myself in Colorado. We have no professional overlap, no incentives, no real reason to stay in touch other than being like-minded. He’s well-read, and I found our conversations enjoyable.

For a few years, we'd catch up spontaneously, sometimes for five minutes and other times for an hour. Always unplanned.

One morning, a few years in, I mentioned my daughter was dealing with an autoimmune disorder that affects less than half of one percent of children.

"You serious?" he asked. "My child is dealing with the same."

He proceeded to answer every question I had. In fifteen minutes, handing over the knowledge he’d assembled over five years.

The relationship didn't make a lot of sense. Until it did.

If we can agree that life unfolds in unexpected ways, we must make the time for what’s unexpected to occur.

Otherwise, life delivers only what's expected, the outcomes we already know how to ask for. Rarely the breakthroughs. The realizations. The things that really matter.

"How we spend our days is, of course, is how we spend our lives." - Annie Dillard

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