thoughts on time
inspiration for the long hold
thoughts on time
Time has always been an imaginary concept, and it matters who imagines it. For most of history, time has been governed by our relationship to the more-than-human world: the rising of the sun and the turning of the seasons. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, time was separated from the earth, and suborned by industry for its own e
... See moreJames Bridle • Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
— Annie Dillard, ’The Writing Life’, 1989
Chamath on the importance of slow compounding:
“The faster you build it, that is the half life: it will get destroyed in the same amount of time.”
Things tend to come and go, tip to one side and then the other, tide out and back in, grow and then rot, get created and destroyed, at the same speed.
meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself.
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
We do things quickly—not better, but quickly—to gain time. But what’s the point if in the time we gain we just do more things quickly? I have yet to meet someone who wants their headstone to read, “He rushed.”
Brad Stulberg • The Practice of Groundedness
Time is the best editor.
If you have it, time is the easiest trick for self-editing. Simply put your work away long enough so when you come back to it you can see it with fresh eyes.
Being alive takes time.
Mark Nepo • The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have
Even outside of work, you are proposing to consume people’s most precious resource: time. Making the effort to consider how you want your guests, and yourself, to be altered by the experience is what you owe people as a good steward of that resource.
Priya Parker • The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
one hour per week spent making the planet a better place, and the rest having fun, is preferable to eight hours per day spent angrily or anxiously thinking about how things ought to be different.