I.
I am the kind of person who really enjoys being productive and who reads books about time management for fun. I get a kick out of doing things well and fine-tuning my habits to get more stuff done. I also really enjoy talking with and teaching others about time management, and I get excited about the untapped potential that could be unleashed through helping people get organised and productive.
But for a while, I’ve been growing a bit uncomfortable with my own teaching. The tools that I enjoy telling people about seem to work. And the writers who I have adapted those tools from have a lot of very helpful things to share.
My worry is deeper than that. It concerns our imagination; the assumptions we make about time itself. I believe that we, in the west, tend to approach time with imaginations that are shaped by the dominant ideas around us, notably: capitalism, consumerism and individualism.
That might all seem very abstract, but I fear that the results of approaching time with imaginations shaped by the dominant culture are all too concrete and all too destructive. If our imaginations – our mindsets – give us the raw ingredients with which we think about time, and if we repeatedly do not like the end products we are getting, then I’d suggest that the best course of action is not to try another combination of the same ingredients, but to source alternative ingredients – an alternative imagination.
To help with this, I am going to draw on the work of the farmer, poet and writer Wendell Berry. His contrarian voice may help us in our search for an alternative imagination. In his essay, The Agrarian Standard, Berry asserts that ‘the most fundamental human difference’ in our society is between the mindsets of industrialism and agrarianism. Industrialism is utilitarian, greedy and impersonal, agrarianism is local, reverent and limited. To put it more crudely one is the mindset of the factory, the other is mindset of the farm.
I wonder if these two mindsets can helpfully be applied to our thinking about time and productivity.
I think that our overwhelming tendency when we think about time and time management in the western world is to do so within what Berry would call an ‘industrialist’ mindset. Berry describes some aspects of the industrialist mind which map scarily well onto how we tend to think about time and time management…
i) To industrialism, all value is utilitarian (where something’s value is about how useful it is.) So, to the industrialist, time is a commodity to be used. How we use time determines its value – think about how easily we talk about making good use of time or wasting time – in the same way that we might make good or bad use of fuel or materials or money. If that’s how we think of time – as a commodity to be used, time management becomes a matter of extracting the greatest use from the minimum amount of time.
ii) ‘Industrialism prescribes an economy that is placeless and displacing,’ this means that time is detached from place and from community. Time is no more than an abstract concept – unconcerned with matters personal or local. To an industrialist mind, things like love, beauty, sacrifice and community have no role in time management – they probably just get in the way.
iii) Following from that, Industrialism encourages us to engage with the world in fragments. Think how easily we divide work and life (or work/life balance) as though there is a hard boundary between working and living. We often do the same in the Church when we divide the secular and the sacred. Some units of time are for God – perhaps a Sunday service, or a devotional time – but the rest, by implication, is not really God’s concern.
iv) Industrialism believes that ‘abundance comes from the violation of all limits.’ And if limits like our bodies, our energy, our calling, are there to be transcended, time management, becomes a matter of ever-expanding conquest – of continual growth and the destruction of all boundaries. It is no surprise, when such ideas dominate, that so much time-management literature is about ways of overcoming limits – of restlessly increasing our capacity. To some, even sleep is treated as an impediment to maximal productivity which we can overcome with the right technology.
v) Finally, industrialism is concerned with quantity over form. Berry describes ‘the wheel of technological progress,’ where insatiable desire for more feeds an overwhelming sense of incompleteness, which in turn feeds a desire for more. This vicious cycle leaves victims of industrialism constantly seeking more and never satisfied. It also results in terrible ugliness, violence and waste. I wonder if this affects many areas of life as dramatically as it affects our relationship to time. The prioritising of quantity over form – of volume over value – leaves us franticly busy and perpetually unsatisfied. However hard we work, enjoyment is evasive. There is always more to do, always new levels to hit, always new goals to achieve. This relentless drive for more turns time into a competitor to struggle against. It does great violence to our physical, emotional, spiritual and social health. When we care more about the quantity of stuff we produce than we do about the form (the true quality, the true value) of what we produce, it drives an economy that relies on greedy extraction, the unrestrained abuse of creation and the misery of the poor.
This might all seem a bit extreme, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m convinced that how we think about time and productivity really matters. This industrialist understanding of time management can produce some decent results – it can help us produce more – but at terrible cost, to ourselves, to our communities and to our planet.
II.
For as long as we are operating within an industrialist mindset, our understanding and practice of time management will probably help us feel quite productive in the short term, but at great cost – to ourselves, to others, and to our planet. Before we explore the alternative mindset that Berry offers, I want to dwell a little more on how we think about time as followers of Jesus, since it is so foundational to all else that follows. Here we turn to the work of John Swinton.
John Swinton is a theologian up in Aberdeen.
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who titles a book Becoming Friends with Time probably has some interesting stuff to say. I am not going to do justice to his work in a quick summary, but here goes…
Swinton talks about viewing time as God’s time. He points out that before clocks appeared in town squares and then in factories, clocks existed in monasteries. They dictated times of prayer. The particular events that the clock scheduled had to do with holding and shaping the day in such a way that sacred values, spiritual concerns and mundane issues could be seen as occurring within God’s time and according to God’s purpose.
When clocks spread beyond monasteries, and in particular with the invention of the second hand and the rigid work schedules of factories, time, says Swinton, became co-opted by capitalism. Time stopped being for God and time became about money. The idea resonates really clearly with what Wendell Berry says about how the industrialist mindset turns time into a commodity to be used.
And remember how the industrialist mindset views time as an enemy to compete against. Contrast that with Swinton’s beautiful phrase ‘becoming friends of time’. Becoming a friend, not an enemy, of time, he says, requires that we shape our lives and communities in ways that will enable God’s people to participate faithfully in Jesus’ redemptive work in time. For Swinton, God’s time is created, gifted, slow, generous, gentle and designed for love. God’s time dictates the speed of love; it refuses to race past those who are moving more slowly. Much of the book focuses on cognitive disability –and his core point is that if our discipleship moves so fast or is so efficient that we exclude people with cognitive disability from participating, then we have also left Jesus behind.
‘Recognizing time properly is a movement away from idolatry and violence toward faithful timefullness. Those who are made in God’s image have time for one another. To give generously of one’s time – to care, notice, value, and appreciate time – is to adopt the attitude of Jesus and to begin to tune one’s body into the cadence of God’s time and the redemption of all time.’
Reading that sort of thing leaves me feeling torn. There is a part of me that is hugely attracted to the beauty of it, but the more pragmatic workaholic in me worries that this just becomes a licence for chaos, for glorified inefficiency, for laziness. But this is different from laziness. Laziness, says Swinton, is the deliberate attempt by human beings both to own and to waste time. Laziness is opting out of faithful participation in God’s redemptive mission.
There is a difference between valuing the slowness of our bodies and our minds and living lives that deliberately scorn the gift of time. I think it is a subtle difference – I don’t pretend I have got it figured out yet. It doesn’t help that the dominant industrialist imagination of our culture provides us with no categories for understanding or valuing those who live slowly and gently at the speed of love. Industrialism cannot distinguish between laziness and timefulness. We need a renewed imagination, a different mindset.
To summarise Swinton’s view of time: time is a gift, given out of love. Time is not something we can master. Instead, time is for love. Time management is therefore about love. We can stifle that love either by being frantically busy, or by procrastinating and withdrawing from meaningful action.
III.
Having critiqued an industrialist understanding of time using Wendell Berry and John Swinton, it’s clear to me that we have a problem. But is there a viable alternative?
To draw on theologian Walter Brueggemann and the Exodus story in the Hebrew Scriptures, industrialism is the way of Pharaoh – it is the way of restless anxiety and relentless consumption. It reduces time to a commodity and neighbour to a competitor. It leaves no space for love or tradition or community, and it excludes those who move more slowly in the world.
We need what Brueggemann would call prophetic imagination – new words and symbols that give language to an alternative way of being with time and ‘becoming friends of time.’
Wendell’s Berry’s alternative is not a shiny new revolutionary worldview – it is a mindset, present on the margins of history for millennia, a mindset that steeped the lives and imagination of many if not most of the biblical authors. It is the mindset of agrarianism – the imagination of those communities on the rural margins, whose way of life has become increasingly mocked, ignored and placed under threat by our industrialised economies.
It’s easy to write Berry and other agrarian writers off as relics of a lost past, clinging nostalgically to some romantic pre-industrial utopia that never really was. But I think that is a lazy and incorrect characterisation.
The agrarian view of creation is grounded, local, and real. Farming is hard – with little room for romanticism or sentimentality. I wonder if accusations of sentimental view of the land are far more justifiably aimed at suburban middle-classes – who care a lot about things like nature and the environment in general, abstract terms – and perhaps enjoy the countryside as a place of leisure or tourism – but without any the intimacy or realism or fidelity of those whose lives and livelihoods are bound to the land in a relationship of multigenerational commitment and care.
Agrarians are not the romantics.
The alternative Berry offers is more than rose-tinted nostalgia. Agrarianism is a deeper, fuller, and, I would argue, profoundly more biblical way of understanding our place in God’s time. It’s made me massively reconsider how I relate to time.
Remember those five characteristics of the industrialist mind that I’ve adapted from Wendell Berry:
The industrialist mind:
- turns time into a commodity to be used
- is placeless and displacing
- breaks the world up into fragments
- believes that abundance comes the from violation of all limits
- is concerned with quantity over form
Let’s contrast each of those with the agrarian mind:
i) The agrarian mind sees human beings as caretakers of something they did not make. Time, therefore, is not a commodity to use and exploit for maximum profit, but a gift to be received with joy, gladness and reverence.
ii) Time, to the agrarian, is a common good – given for the benefit of all people. That means that the way we steward the gift of time cannot be a matter of competitive individual striving, but a community exercise, if which no one is left behind. According to theologian Ellen Davis, the idea in the Hebrew Scriptures of nahala – or possessing the land – is not only, and maybe not primarily, about conquest but also about care. I wonder if that transposes onto time? An agrarian’s relationship with time is less about conquest and more about care – caretaking – as custodians of a gift.
iii) Agrarianism sees time as a unitary whole. Rather than being fragmented and divided, time is integrated – wholeness and fullness of time become the aim. In How to be a Poet, Berry writes that ‘there are no unsacred places / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.’ I wonder if that transposes from place to time, and if we could equally say that to the agrarian mind, there is no unsacred time, only sacred time, and desecrated time? If that carries, then the popular idea of giving God a fragment of our day (even the best bit of our day) is problematic. That’s not to say we should dispense with spiritual rhythms, but it ought to move the goalposts. Starting the day with quiet time might be very good but it is not the aim. Living in God’s time, for the agrarian, surely means learning to dispense with any sacred/secular divide and living with an alertness to God’s presence and resurrection power in the present moment – however mundane or everyday that moment may be. It reminds me a bit of Brother Lawrence’s idea of practicing the presence of God.
iv) In agrarianism, limits matter. Agrarians know all too well the destruction – to land, bodies and community – that comes when farming has been co-opted by the industrialist addiction to transcending limits. James Rebanks, in English Pastoral, describes well the devastation wreaked on both sides of the Atlantic by industrial farming. In full knowledge of the damage that comes with the cult of ‘bigger is better’, the agrarian imagination is content to live within natural limits: valuing integrity, simplicity, family coherence, neighbourliness and local economies.
v) In direct contrast to industrialism, agrarianism is concerned with form over quantity. How we produce is more important than how much we produce. Living in time is not a mechanistic matter of efficiency, it is an art. It is about the value, not the volume of our work. The aim is wholeness, completeness and holiness.
With all of that in mind, it’s time we grounded this all a little more practically.
IV.
I’ve raised some of the deep problems of understanding time through the lens of an industrialist imagination and I’ve begun to offer one alternative way of seeing the world and being in time: the agrarian imagination. But this isn’t all a prelude before landing on some snazzy new tool for productivity and time management.
To an industrialist, tools are about utility and efficiency – means of producing greater output with lower input. But agrarians also have a place for tools, they just perceive of them differently. To agrarians, tools are carefully selected – they are about longevity, simplicity and skill.
All that to say, I am not against time management tools. Whether we should use any tools to help us get stuff done is the wrong question, because we all do, it’s just that many of us have habituated the use of bad time management tools without thinking about it. The right questions, I think, are how we decide which tools to use, and how we use those ones we pick.
So, I am not proposing any snazzy new tools or techniques for getting organised and productive. But I do want to end with a few thoughts on how an agrarian imagination could influence the way that we pick and use many of the existing tools that are in wide circulation.
For followers of Jesus, like so much in discipleship, this is a matter of congruence. Eugene Peterson said that the Christian life is ‘a lifelong practice of attending to the details of congruence.’ By congruence, he means things matching up. In particular he talks about the importance of congruence between what we do and the way we do it. It’s dangerously easy to do the right things but in the wrong way. It’s easy to be right about what we do, but wrong about how we do it.
It is easy to do all the right stuff when it comes to productivity but to do it the wrong way.
We can be brilliant at week reviews, and using our calendars, and deep work, and prioritising what is important and not urgent, but still treat time as a commodity to use and exploit, or treat time in fragments divided into sacred and secular, or find ourselves in a frantic effort to violate our God-given limits, or move at a pace that is incompatible with love.
We can do all the right stuff but in the wrong way.
So what?
If we are to attempt to uproot our imaginations from industrialism and re-root in agrarian soil, the implications will necessarily spread far beyond our approach to time and productivity. I want to do more thinking about how all of this spills out into other arenas of life, not least how we approach work. But for now, let’s land this where we started: with our practice of time management and productivity.
An agrarian imagination could lead us to approach time management in the following ways:
- We plan each day with care. Prioritising tasks becomes a way of accepting our limits, of choosing value not volume. I can’t do all of the good things that I’d like to do today, but I can do a few things, and I am going to do them well – valuing form over quantity.
- We use our calendars as a way of carving out time for what really matters as well as allowing margin in our days so that we are not moving too fast to love people, so that we can greet unexpected interruptions as a gift not an annoyance.
- We rest well not as a means to an end, not in order to work harder tomorrow, but because we are living in God’s time and God’s time is unhurried. The salvation of the world does not depend on our frantic activity. We rest as an act of resistance to the dehumanising demands of the industrialist imagination, and as an act of trust in God’s redemption of all things.
- We build whatever practices we need to minimise unhelpful procrastination, not because we’re anxiously obsessed with avoiding time wasting and we don’t like to have fun, but because we recognise that time is a gift, and that time is for love, and that excessive social media, or gaming, or nervous news reading (my current procrastination of choice) – especially when it is addictive and competing for our attention – isn’t helping us become people of love.
- We guard time for deep work and limit the time we spend responding to notifications and with our inboxes open in tabs on our screen, not because we are trying to outcompete our colleagues, but because we are focusing our attention on what matters most, meaning that we are more fruitful, and we love each other well by producing good work.
- We do week reviews, in a way and a rhythm that suits us, not because we’re striving each week to seize total control over our schedules, but as a practice of reflection – no less ‘spiritual’ than an hour of prayer – that recognises the gift of time, that learns from the week just gone, and maps out the week ahead in a way that will best enable us to be fruitful – to love God and to love others.
- We say no to a lot of things – even a lot of good things – because we recognise and respect our limits. That means that we will sometimes disappoint people. But the alternative is slavery to frantic busyness that comes from trying to transcend our limits. An agrarian imagination allows us to be clear on what is most important and it equips us to say no to other things without guilt. It weans us off the fear of missing out by grounding us in the personal and the local.
Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: a Conversation in Spiritual Theology (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2005)
John Swinton, Becoming Friends of Time: Disability, Timefullness and Gentle Discipleship (London: SCM, 2017)
Wendell Berry, ‘The Agrarian Standard’ and ‘Quantity Versus Form’, in Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire (London: Penguin, 2018)
Wendell Berry ‘How to be a Poet’, in Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things (London: Penguin, 2018)
Notes From the Potting Shed 
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