Time is not money

It’s a gift

Feeling overwhelmed by life and work, I thought that if I got better at time management, I’d find more balance. Fortunately, when I shared this goal with a few friends and colleagues, they recommended not a particular method but instead two books that question the way our culture relates to time in general.

Saving Time by Jenny Odell made me aware of how much our language around time relates to money: we spend time, we buy time, a travel delay costs us an hour, and so on. Odell details how, especially over the past two centuries, our view of time became bound up with work for wages, “the necessity of selling your time,” she writes. 

Odell makes clear how productivity culture distorts our idea of time, just as how our economy distorts whose time and labor is considered worth a high income or even a living wage. The culture of busyness and the need for many to sell as much of their time as possible through wage labor “uphold the same system,” Odell writes. There is a social or financial cost (or both) to resisting this. But those for whom the cost is primarily a social cost can consider not paying it. Doing that “opens the door to an important recognition: not of shared consequences, but of a shared cause.” The growing number of workers who are unionizing and those who run themselves ragged trying to do everything can alike ask, Who is benefiting from the work I am doing, and what are the costs to my well-being? 

Oliver Burkeman was one of those harried people trying to be efficient and productive. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals begins with his own realization, after trying various time management methods, that “the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes. I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are.”

That acceptance can reorient us to how we relate to other people and time itself. One of Oliver Burkeman’s best insights is about how our orientation to time can cause us to treat time instrumentally and even use other people toward a future goal. “Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments,” Burkeman writes. 

The question remains for me after reading Odell and Burkeman, How do we decide what our time is worth, when we consider that by sharing our time in one way we can’t in another?

Even in a wage relationship, we can expect respect from each other, yet we do not owe our clients or employers more than that respect to do the work we said we’d do. I have found this dynamic can be even harder in nonprofit, cause-driven work. We give our time to clients or employers in exchange for money, and, if we’re lucky, a sense of being part of a common cause. 

I am self-employed. Each time I set rates for editing projects, or take on a writing assignment, I am essentially asking myself, What is an hour of my time worth? Since my first book was published last year, I add into the mix various ways of promoting my book, which all are uncertain in their reward. 

Burkeman offers “a partial solution to the problem of an overly instrumentalized life. We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone . . . activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.” Instead of worrying about whether we’re using our time optimally, we can enjoy our days to the greatest extent possible by throwing out the whole notion of time being spent well or wasted.

Just as time is not money, work is not life. Time is a gift. We freely receive our moments and our days. We share time in various ways and with various people, and we do well to keep enough to meet our own needs before we share with others.  

Book update

I had two book events in recent months. In May in Minneapolis I met with the people from three congregations and beyond to discuss the topic Shared Spaces, Shared Leadership—a conversation about how we live out our social justice commitments in our congregational and building relationships, touching on topics of gender equity, racial justice, and neighborhood change. I drew on stories from my book What You Sow Is a Bare Seed: A Countercultural Christian Community during Five Decades of Change, as well as my experience in urban congregations and as a journalist covering the US religious landscape. In June in Goshen, Indiana, I spoke with leaders from congregations in the same region as my faith community about Seasons in the Life of a Congregation. Both talks could be adapted to many different contexts. Please let me know if you’re interested in having me speak to your community or organization. (You can reply to this email.)

If you are a professor or are inclined to pass this on to professors who might be interested in assigning my book to seminary students (and possible some college students also), here are the details: What You Sow Is a Bare Seed: A Countercultural Christian Community during Five Decades of Change offers an in-depth case study for field education and contextual learning, weaving together research into the wider church and society with compelling stories of real people, describing congregational dynamics in an engaging way. If you are interested in an exam copy, please fill out this form.

Reading and listening

An article I wrote based on my book appears in the August issue of the Christian Century: “My childhood congregation was a progressive Christian dream come true: So why don’t more of the people who grew up there practice Christianity as adults?” 

About two dozen of us—mostly born in the late 1960s through late 1980s—spent all or much of our childhood in this community. As we stood talking that weekend in 2016, I felt a kinship even with those I knew least. We hadn’t been able to find anything else like the Community of Christ in our lives, no other place where we felt so at home.

And a review I wrote appeared in a recent issue of Anabaptist World: “Flourishing by simplifying.” 

“Above my kitchen sink is a window, as there was in each of my grandparents’ homes. When I’m washing dishes, among other times, I often think of my Plain Mennonite and Amish ancestors.”

I’ve been revisiting Björk’s 1997 album Homogenic, which was a favorite during my high-school years. I often listen to the song “All Is Full of Love” during my morning time when I seek to empty my mind of thoughts and worries, before I begin my workday and answering emails and texts. The lyrics facilitate that when Bjork sings, “Your phone is off the hook / Your doors are shut.” I smile remembering the ’90s.