The cost of having time

THE RUB

I was watching two men burn and scrape out a canoe from a thick tree trunk. This was at The Feast of the Hunters Moon, a fall festival at Fort Ouiatenon near West Lafayette, Indiana that offers a re-creation of the annual fall gathering of French settlers and Native Americans in the mid-1700s.

The men were clothed in period garb, and their effort was clearly starting to look like a canoe. I suspect they had started a few weeks before the event.

A guy standing next to me, turns to his friend and said, “Boy they sure had a lot more time on their hands back then.”

I thought, WTF? They had much less time on their hands. They lived shorter lives, and had to spend most of their time engaged in survival activities.

That incident was over 30 years ago, and I’m only now rethinking my reaction thanks to Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals?

THE FRAMEWORK

Burkeman argues that we don’t possess time—that the concept of “having time” is a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution. As factory workers began to trade time for pay, business owners demanded more productivity out of each hour.

Previously, farmers worked to complete a task with no connection to time. They would rise with the sun, labor in the fields, break for food, rest a little, do a little more work, eat with their families, and call it a day. With no time clock in sight, there was always more work to be done.

Burkeman drives home this point with the old parable of a successful New York financier vacationing in Mexico, where he meets a local fisherman who works for a few hours each morning, then spends the rest of his day listening to music by the sea and drinking wine with friends.

The businessman suggests he should work harder. If he put in a few more hours, he could save up money to buy extra boats and then hire other fishermen to do the work and labor for him. Then he could retire rich. The fisherman asked, "What would I do then?" The businessman said, "Well, you could spend time listening to music with your friends and drinking by the sea."

THE PRACTICE

Reading Burkeman prompted me to revisit that overheard observation. My fellow observer and I were struck by the slow, deliberate labor required to transform a tree into a canoe. But we both were viewing it from a “quantity of time” mindset. He saw the reenactors as unhurried—having so much time. Where I saw them as overburdened—having so little time.

The real difference wasn’t if the settlers had more or less time than we do. It was their relationship to time. The OG canoe crafters weren’t on a deadline. They weren’t checking a clock. The fire told them when it was ready.

I thrive in our modern day “having time” world. I time box my projects and constantly set expected timelines even though my estimates are usually wrong thanks to Hofstadter’s Law which states any task you’re planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

The closest I’ve come timeless thinking was in 2022 when I experimented running a 50 mile race without a watch. I was inspired by a hippie friend of mine who doesn’t track his time or mileage. The goal was to “be present” and enjoy the experience. Unfortunately, that came at a cost. I didn’t finish the race because I timed out at mile 45. Apparently, I was having too much of a good time on the course.

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