How Time Got Away From Me, and How I Got it Back

I think about time a lot. As the owner of a small consulting company, I can’t help it. Questions like, “When do you need it?,” “Do we have time?,” or “How much time will that take?” are in regular rotation.

This was all intensified as we moved out of the worst of the pandemic and the world started to get busy again—and I mean really busy really quickly. It felt like we were on an endless hamster wheel, churning things out as fast as we could to make up for time lost during lockdown due to project delays. I found myself saying, “Yes! Sure can!” far too often. As a result—I’m not going to lie—my team was overworked.

I had completely lost control of time.

So, I made a promise to myself to never let that happen again. My first step was to put my employees first, over our clients. For a consulting firm that relies on clients to stay in business, that can be scary. Without our amazing clients, our business does not exist. But our clients deserve our best selves, and we can’t be that if we are all stretched thin.

As much as we all like to think of our time as infinite and unbounded, it is in fact concrete. Time is measurable in minutes, hours, days, and years. If we want work-life balance, the time we have available to devote to work is limited, and if we are serious about being in control of our time, we cannot forget that. We only have so much time to give.

I am not alone in thinking of work time as finite. In his newsletter Agents of Change, Mike Murawski reflected brilliantly on the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once in a cleverly titled piece called “You Can’t Do Everything Everywhere All At Once.” In it, Mike shares strategies for resisting the temptation to overwork for the satisfaction of getting things done and how to instead focus on only doing work that matters. Stephanie Evergreen similarly wrote a post about the finite and precious nature of time in relationship to work called “80,000 hours” (the amount of time the average person works in a lifetime).

To take control of our time, I did something pretty simple. Like Evergreen, I counted how many hours each of us on staff are expected to work in a year, subtracting time for holidays, personal time, and sick time. What I came up with is that each of us on staff should work about 1,775 hours per year. If any of us spends more time working than that, something or someone is going to suffer. Simple as that.

My first reaction to this realization was worry—is that enough time to do everything we need to do? But once I let this realization sink in, I found it empowering. I began to see our 1,775 hours per employee per year as a way to draw boundaries around what we can and cannot do as a team.

Thinking of time at this level of specificity (an exact number) and scale (an entire year, not a day or a week) immediately helped me see how valuable our time is. Now I can more easily plan ahead and protect our future selves because I know exactly how much time each of us has (Hidden Brain has an episode about this). I have the confidence to make decisions about whether to take on new work and/or hire more staff or contractors. Most importantly, taking control of time in this way helps me be intentional and prioritize the work that is most in alignment with our values and expertise.