I’ve reached the age now where I look back on major life events and am surprised by how long ago they took place. “That was five years ago,” I realized the other day as I thought about my mid-pandemic graduation from McGill; “that was ten years ago,” I noticed as I came across some old writing of mine.
I’m still not yet at the point, however, where I’m able to look back on the past and tie specific years to specific events or even specific periods of my life, although I do also wonder if perhaps this is just not a skill that my generation has had the opportunity to develop. Having grown up amid the timelessness of the digital present, where everything is simultaneously always happening and always new, I worry that I may have missed the window on learning to think in terms of that kind of spatial temporality.
I find, in fact, that I think less and less about time these days, in part because I’ve found that I’m able to both get a lot more accomplished and feel a lot more present when I keep my thinking about it to a minimum. To some extent, this is a consequence of the tools I’ve learned to incorporate into my workflow — I’ve been a devoted practitioner of the pomodoro method for about a decade — but it’s probably also a consequence of having advanced far enough in my career that I don’t have to think about time as often, not in the way that I used to. Gone are the days, for example, of not knowing how much time would be needed to feel ready for a big exam, or to feel confident in submitting the final version of an important deliverable, so that the only available solution was to dedicate every possible moment to the task until its deadline and just hope that it would be enough. Now, I’ve developed enough expertise in the areas I work in to feel not just confident but also grounded in my ability to get the things I need to do done within the amount of time I’ve allotted to them.
In some ways, it’s not even so much a question of time management as it is about a shift in perspective on value. I now place much greater value on the cumulative effects of consistent long-term impact than I do on maximizing individual, short-term gains, and this perspective alone ends up making a lot of time-related decisions for me. When I’m working on the audio engineering for the podcast, for example, it keeps me from sinking an extra 2 hours into further fine-tuning the sound quality on a given episode because I’m able to recognize that bringing it from 97% perfect to 99% perfect isn’t going to have any meaningful impact on its long-term success — and that, as a result, my time could better be spent elsewhere, on the many things I can do that will have that effect.
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Recommended reading
- “Greetings from Georgia O’Keeffe’s kitchen,” by Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein
- “Reading Elena Ferrante in English? You’re also reading Ann Goldstein,” by Joumana Khatib
- “What do editors worry about?,” by Phoebe Morgan
- The Dry Season, by Melissa Febos (we were exactly 3 days into summer when I declared it the ‘book of the summer’)
Once a month, I share a curated collection of ideas I keep returning to: concepts that are surfacing in my work, questions I’m wrestling with, patterns I’m noticing. These posts are my way of thinking out loud and sparking some interesting conversations along the way.
This series is part of an ongoing experiment in exploring how to most meaningfully share what I know while connecting with others who care about similar ideas. (See also: my weekly office hours.)
This post is the 5th instalment in the series. If you’re interested in learning more, have a peek at the previous posts for May, April, and March. And if you enjoyed reading this post, stay tuned for the next instalment at the end of July.
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Jana M. Perkins is a computational social scientist. An award-winning scholar, her research has been federally funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada since 2019. She is the founder of Women of Letters, a longform interview series celebrating women’s paths to professional success. Together with Miranda Dunham-Hickman, she is co-authoring a book that will be published by Routledge.
To learn more about Perkins and her latest work, visit janajm.com or follow her on Bluesky.