Interrupting the flow: June 30, 1997 issue of New Thinking

June 30, 1997 New Thinking:
Interrupting the flow

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June 30, 1997

Interrupting the flow

By Gerry McGovern

For a long time, Irish people didn’t worry about keeping time. We let it flow easily, not watching our watches, but rather taking the day as the day would take us. While this was a very natural, earthy way of approaching life, it had drawbacks.

Not being on time was a disadvantage from a business point of view. There was a basic rule: the less seriously you treated time-keeping, the less likely you were to succeed economically.

Ireland has progressed substantially in the economic sphere over the last ten years. There are more jobs, the economy is booming. People describe us as the Celtic Tiger.

It’s great. A wonderful time. However, as we become more focused on time, we may see an erosion over time of some of the things which contributed to our unique cultural identity.

An American artist who was living in Ireland was interviewed on radio, and was asked why he had decided to settle here. He said that he had arrived in Dublin for a short holiday. The night he arrived he had walked around the city and it had really struck him how every clock was telling a very different time. This was the place for him, he realized.

The more time you have the more time you have to flow, the more time you have for rhythm, for moving with the natural pulse. The more your time is squeezed the more you are squeezed, the less you flow and the more you fit or are fitted.

Obviously, there’s a balance. Living naturally is all well and good but these days it doesn’t put too much food on the table or comfort in the home. We want more. We want to squeeze more out of our time so that we can have a better lifestyle.

However, it would seem that as we speed through the early years of the digital age, it is not we who are squeezing time but we who are being squeezed. Edupage recently reported about how “a Gallup-San Jose State University survey of 972 executives, managers and administrative staff at Fortune 1000 companies, found that half of those questioned said they were interrupted by messages six or more times an hour, leaving them overwhelmed by the number of messages they receive.”

Managing our time is not simply about getting the most out of it. It should also be about creating space within the day. It should be about creating space to ‘do nothing’, to let our thoughts flow without deadline pressure.

Ireland has contributed greatly to world literature. Words were things which we played with when we had time, which we had lots of. Indeed, positive things come from managing and squeezing time. But good things come from flowing with time, from easing up. In this frenzied era, we should not lose sight of that.

We should also consider that there may well be a law of diminishing returns with regard to squeezing time. Squeezing it beyond a certain point may mean that previous gains are whittled away.

I don’t believe it’s any accident that the world is full of rhythm and flow. Because life without rhythm is a jarring place.

Gerry McGovern

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Managing our time is not simply about getting the most out of it.