Last week I sat in a conference audience and listened to Chris Guillebeau say five words I’ve spent a year circling: “Everything is immediate now.”
Heads nodded all around me. Nobody asked if it had to be this way.
Chris was there talking about his book Time Anxiety, and he makes a bracing argument. He rejects time management outright. He locates the problem not in a shortage of hours but in unrealistic expectations and misaligned priorities. He calls urgency what it mostly is: an illusion. And his tools are real. Uncover the unwritten time rules that govern your days, the ones like “I answer every email before I sleep,” and rewrite them. Embrace good enough. Build a tolerance for the incomplete list. This is the inner relationship with time, handled with unusual depth and honesty, and if that relationship is where your trouble lives, read him. But don’t stop there.
Since I work with leadership teams, I keep thinking about what happens next.
So imagine the leader who takes the book seriously. She rewrites her time rules. She makes peace with the incomplete list. She stops treating every task as urgent, because she has learned to see that urgency for what it mostly is: an illusion.
It works. For about a week.
Then Monday’s meeting reissues every rule she rewrote, without anyone deciding to. Because the illusion of urgency is personal, and she saw through it. But what her organization built is not an illusion. It is a climate. And a climate does not care what you see.
Here is the distinction I keep drawing for executive teams. Time anxiety is what the person feels. Ambient urgency is what the organization constructed: the always-on condition where urgency stops being information and becomes the weather. Nobody wrote your company’s time rules, which is exactly why rewriting your own does not dissolve them. The unwritten rule “we respond within the hour” does not live in any one person’s head. It lives in the room, in the channels, in what gets praised on Tuesday and escalated on Wednesday. Every individual can see through it, and it survives, because no individual owns the ability to change it.
Everything is immediate now. That is true of the world, and the world is not ours to change. But the world supplies the weather; the organization supplies the climate. Two companies sit in the same storm. In one, every meeting runs at emergency pitch. In the other, big questions get held open past the point of comfort. Same weather at the door. Different climate inside. The climate was never out of anyone’s hands. It just was never in any single person’s hands, which is a different thing.
This is why the countermoves I teach are structural, not personal. The parking lot that makes displacement a decision instead of an accident. The protected in-between, the unscheduled margin that is not slack but the safety factor. The end-of-week sort of what actually got closed versus what merely ended. Notice what these have in common: none of them changes how anyone feels about time. They change what the room does. A leader’s inner work travels with her. A team’s climate has to be rebuilt where it lives.
Chris’s book and this work are complements, not competitors. The leader who does only the inner work walks back into the building. The leader who does only the structural work stays privately frantic inside a calmer system. Do both. But know which half is yours alone to do, and which half only you, if you run the place, can start.
The illusion is yours to see through. The climate is yours to change.
Take good care,
Karen