Time Management Guide

Results in No Time is a "one-stop time management shop," providing leading-edge consulting and seminars that help with all time management problems and tasks.

Time management addresses various tasks, habits, and time-wasting perceptions and feelings. The most common tasks, habits, and feelings to deal with are listed below. See whether you can identify your task, habit, or feeling in the list. Then click on it to go to readings and techniques for dealing with it. In many cases it may take extensive, disciplined practice of these techniques. If you have difficulty identifying the issue and would like some help, send an email to Steve Randall.

anxiety deadline pressure determining goals and priorities emotions that waste time feeling of time passing handling projects indecision/confusion/uncertainty/doubt measuring progress overwhelm/helplessness planning procrastination producing more in less time scatteredness/distractedness/lack of concentration scheduling time poverty (the feeling that you don't have enough time) tiredness

For a free, introductory seminar that presents ideas and methods necessary for mastering time, including what time is and how our experience of time is created and influenced, check out Mastering Tiime 101. The essential conventional time mangement skills are to identify long-term goals, break down projects, prioritize tasks, estimate how long it will take to do things, and organize and schedule tasks. Check out the free conventional time mangement seminar, Mastering Time 103. Here's a short list of what's necessary to master conventional time management:

Clarify and write down your long- and short-term objectives in major areas of life. Keep the objectives current. Break projects down into doable tasks. Update project plans as necessary.

For all identified tasks, set priorities and estimate the time required so that you're aware of what's important and when things are scheduled. Schedule periodically and create to-do lists and calendars with scheduled tasks and appointments. Do the tasks, focusing on top priorities, and doing things in the time allocated (except for unexpected changes). Periodically ask Lakein's question: "What is the best use of my time right now?" Change tasks as appropriate.

Besides conventional time management (CTM) , which handles what objectives and tasks we do, there's inner time management (ITM), which optimizes how we do things. For starters, see Mastering Tiime 101. Also see Principles of Psychological Time Management for a summary of ITM. Here's a short list of what's necessary to master inner time management:

Learn the differences between clock time and felt time. Learn about the 'felt time' in your native culture, including its effects on your health and productivity, and how these effects relate to peak experiences. Learn how our various experiences of felt time get created and intensified. Learn methods useful to transform your native 'felt time' to the level of timelessness desired. (Six levels can be identified.) Periodically, whatever you're doing, ask Randall's question: "Am I timelessly involved in what's at hand?" Increase absorption in activities any way you can.

In general, the way to simultaneously optimize health and well-being, productivity, and quality of products and processes is to continually get more involved in whatever is at hand, whether work or play. See What Guarantees Optimal Productivity and Well-Being?

Transforming Anxiety
Try these antidotes for anxiety:

Breathing exercise, a relaxing way of breathing that immediately relieves anxiety Lightening Thoughts, a relaxing, slow head rotation exercise Opening Throat Energy, a visualization of warm flowing energy Transforming Emotions, a very effective physical exercise for all emotions Time of Thinking, an exercise to free up compulsive or driven thinking

Note: If you have questions or comments about these exercises, please send email to or call Steve Randall at 510-690-0490.

Anxiety often seems built into the fabric of life:

"What . . . is the nature of the reality that we believe in evidentially? Transiency is the main reality. We appear to live in an ever-perishing world. It seems that our life is confined to a single instant at a time. We see everything passing away--for ever . . . . We witness, apparently, events, people, and things disappearing into total extinction, into an absolute nothingness, as the result of passing-time." (p. 80, Nicoll, Living Time) The self lives in the world like a permanent alien, always afraid that if it stirs up trouble its papers will be revoked and deportation proceedings initiated. (p. 226, LOK) As long as we continue to operate within a limited 'lower space' perspective which perceives a 'self' set apart from an 'other', our experience will remain a self-perpetuating cycle of anxiety, frustration, pain, and despair. We need to transcend the 'isolated self' perspective altogether in order to deal directly with the root of our emotional and psychological problems . . . . (p. 66, TSK) Craving sets up a constrictive field (or 'space') in which no positive, expansive feelings or healing can take place. An initial fascination or anxiety stimulates craving, which gives way to grasping, only to create further anxiety--instead of fulfillment. (p. 269, TSK) However, there are other possibilities: We can learn to view both positive and negative situations as 'time'; and as such, we can transform them . . . . We can develop a better understanding of the locatedness of the knowing self in our limited temporal structure. Living within such a limited time, we are insensitive to many inspiring forces or dimensions, and are thus subject to life as being an extremely pressing and compelling process. By learning to 'know' 'time' better, we can counteract this general trend and can open to an infinity of 'time' for fulfillment. Once all temporal partitions are down, and 'time' is at the disposal of 'knowingness', we can be released from all fear, anxiety, and strain. Even the fear of death can be transcended, since in this more comprehensive view of 'time', there is no death. (p. xiii-xiv, TSK)

Time Management: The Pickle Jar Theory

by Jeremy Wright
Theres something about a nice crunchy pickle, isnt there? I mean the aroma may make some people puke, but for me its the taste and the juice forcing itself into your mouth like a divine cascade of flavor. As a wise man once said, Its like a taste explosion in your mouth! Well, this article really has nothing to do with pickles, nor does it have anything to do with eating or wise men at all. In fact this article has nothing to do with anything tangible, unless you choose to follow along. Though you dont have to, I would strongly suggest it as you could have quite the nifty little craft project by the end of this piece!

The jar
Time Management theories have come and gone. Ive tried many of these and most have failed because of the sheer amount of time I needed to commit to the theory in order to save some time. The return just never seemed to justify the cost, if you know what I mean. The latest theory of Time Management I heard has actually caused me to stop and think about how I run my entire life. This kind of thing doesnt happen very often, and no I dont mean thinking, cheeky readers! The theory that was recently taught in a Leadership course Im enduring is called the Pickle Jar Theory.

The theory
Imagine if you will an, or for those crafty people among you just go get an, empty pickle jar. Big pickle jar, you could fit at least three of the largest pickles youve ever imagined inside of it. For those of you who dont like pickles, I apologize, feel free to substitute the words pancake jar for pickle jar as needed. Okay, so youve got yourself a pickle jar. Now, put some large rocks in it. Put in as many as you possibly can. Let me know when its full. Now, I know you think its full, but put a couple more in anyway. Okay, youve got a full pickle jar that you cant fit anything else into, right? Now, put some pebbles in. Put as many in as you can possibly fit, and raise your hand and bark like a pig when you feel your jar is full. Now, take your full jar and take sand and, you guessed it, fill that jar until you cant possibly fit anymore in, and then add some water. I am sure the significance of this little exercise hasnt escaped any of you. Each of us has many large priorities in our life, represented by the large rocks. We also have things which we enjoy doing, such as the pebbles. We have other things we have to do, like the sand. And finally, we have things that simply clutter up our lives and get in everywhere: water. None of these are bad things. After all, we need the gamut of these objectsfrom large priorities to times of restin order to feel truly fulfilled. No Time Management theory should be without balance, and the Pickle Jar theory is all about balance. You make time for everything, and everything simply fits well where it is supposed to fit.

Me and my day
As an example of my pre-pickle day, my little to-do list looked a lot like this:

8:00: check and respond to email 8:30: check various community sites and respond where required

9:00: ensure all web properties are running properly 9:15: set priorities for the day 9:30: go for a walk, grab some water 10:00: do website maintenance, remove outdated content 11:00: draft an article 11:30: polish next article to go out 12:00: ensure all things web-related are handled, running well and all questions are answered 12:30: lunch 1:30: do programming on latest large project 2:30: write letters to clients to keep them abreast of changes in the last three days to their projects 3:30: check with team on progress, deal with issues 4:30: etc., etc., etc. Now, I may have actually accomplished a lot in this type of day; in fact, I typically did. All my websites were running properly, Id written an article or two, Id done actual work, Id built client relationships, Id ensured my team was working properly, so what could be wrong? Well, take a look at the first five hours of my day. Between 8am and 1pm, all I manage to actually get done that couldnt fit into other times when my mind tends to wander (and I tend to do these things anyway) was a little bit of article writing. This part of the day was really a supreme waste of time. I often went to lunch feeling like I was convincing myself that I had been productive. At the end of the day I always believed that a lot got done, but my lunch times always felt slightly depressing. Beyond that, this schedule did not work if a client walked in and needed an exceptional amount of work done, if a site had crashed overnight, or if I had an email that required more than five minutes of attention. If anything unexpected happened, which we all know should actually be expected, my whole morning and often my entire day fell apart.

My new, improved day

In these post-pickle days, my schedule looks rather different. I now schedule in times when my rocks should get done and let my other priorities, the unexpected and little things I do all day, like surf the web, fill in the gaps. New schedule: 800: figure out rocks for the day (literally, this is what it says!) and deal with emergencies 830: article writing as appropriate 1000: programming 1300: client correspondence Suddenly I have what feels like a more open day. I have more time for programming, I get things done earlier, I am more relaxed, my schedule is more fluid. It all works incredibly well. In the post-pickle days I realized that I needed to really figure out what my big rocks were during the day and not schedule time for anything else in my daily routine. Email is not a rock: I can go a few minutes and, wonder of wonders, even a day or two without touching it.

Email is a lot like the phone in that even though we all have our phones on just in case an important call happens, when we look back on our year it is rare that we can remember more than one or two occasions where we absolutely needed to answer our phone or email at that precise instant.

The detractors
There are of course those in the audience who will never have practiced Time Management techniques in the past. They feel they are productive enough and get enough done. Im glad, way to go, give yourselves a hand. Now, grab your jar again. Empty it. Fill your jar with water until it is completely full. Now, try and add some sand. What do you mean it didnt work? This is the essence of the Pickle (or Pancake) Jar Theory. By first ensuring that your large priorities are tackled, scheduled, and done for the day, you can then let the smaller but less important things in until you have somehow allowed time in your day for everything you needed to do, while still relaxing and having fun.

The value of water

I strongly encourage everyone to use at least one Time Management System. It empowers you to actually do instead of scurrying about without any goals in sight. Whether you choose this particular system or not, remember: eat the pickles before you empty the jar, they are so good!

Discuss
Was it good for you, too? Discuss this article. Jeremy is a designer, developer, etc. Not big on titles, he loves doing anything that will help folk out, and has been doing so through articles and tutorials for nearly a decade.

Time Management Tips

Prepared by the Self-Development Center A Service of the Counseling and Student Development Center George Mason University Student Union I, Room 350 993-2999

Scheduling and managing time wisely are important for the college student. If you miss important appointments and deadlines you will cause complications to both your academic and social lives. This causes anxiety, frustration, guilt, and other nasty feelings. This brochure is not going to tell you to study more and socialize less, although in some cases you might want to consider it. Instead, it will suggest how to make the most of your time and personalize it to fit your tastes and activities.

It will also show you how to set your priorities. This is pertinent for busy schedules. One way that we will suggest is the daily do lists. This brochure will also give you a variety of tips on how to save time and enhance the time that you have. Feel free to print this file or pick a copy in the Self-Development Center, SUB I, Room 350.

A Personal Time Survey

To begin managing your time you first need a clearer idea of how you now use your time. The Personal Time Survey will help you to estimate how much time you currently spend in typical activities. To get a more accurate estimate, you might keep track of how you spend your time for a week. This will help you get a better idea of how much time you need to prepare for each subject. It will also help you identify your time wasters. But for now complete the Personal Time Survey to get an estimate. The following survey shows the amount of time you spend on various activities. When taking the survey, estimate the amount of time spent on each item. Once you have this amount, multiply it by seven. This will give you the total time spent on the activity in one week. After each item's weekly time has been calculated, add all these times for the grand total. Subtract this from 168, the total possible hours per week. Here We Go:
1. 2. 3. Number of hours of sleep each night _______ _______ _______ _______ _______ _______ _______ _______ _______ etc. _______ _______ _______ ________ X 7 = Number of grooming hours per day ________ X 7 = Number of hours for meals/snacks per day - include preparation time _______ X 7 = 4a. Total travel time weekdays _______ X 5 = 4b. Total travel time weekends 5. Number of hours per week for regularly scheduled functions (clubs, church, get-togethers, etc.) 6. Number of hours per day for chores, errands, extra grooming, etc. _______ X 7 = 7. Number of hours of work per week 8. Number of hours in class per week 9. Number of average hours per week socializing, dates, Be honest! Now add up the totals: Subtract the above number from 168 _______ =

The remaining hours are the hours you have allowed yourself to study.

Study Hour Formula

To determine how many hours you need to study each week to get A's, use the following rule of thumb. Study two hours per hour in class for an easy class, three hours per hour in class for an average class, and four hours per hour in class for a difficult class. For example, basket weaving 101 is a relatively easy 3 hour course. Usually, a person would not do more than 6 hours of work outside of class per week. Advanced calculus is usually considered a difficult course, so it might be best to study the proposed 12 hours a week. If more hours are needed, take away some hours from easier courses, i.e., basket weaving. Figure out the time that you need to study by using the above formula for each of your classes.
Easy class credit hours Average class credit hours ________ x 2 = _______ ________ x 3 = _______

Difficult class credit hours Total

________ x 4 = _______ _______

Compare this number to your time left from the survey. Now is the time when many students might find themselves a bit stressed. Just a note to ease your anxieties. It is not only the quantity of study time but also it's quality. This formula is a general guideline. Try it for a week, and make adjustments as needed.

Daily Schedules
There are a variety of time schedules that can fit your personality. These include engagement books, a piece of poster board tacked to a wall, or 3 x 5 cards. Once you decide upon the style, the next step is construction. It is best to allow spaces for each hour, half-hours for a busy schedule. First, put down all of the necessities; classes, work, meals, etc. Now block in your study time (remember the study time formula presented earlier). Schedule it for a time when you are energized. Also, it's best to review class notes soon after class. Make sure to schedule in study breaks, about 10 minutes each hour. Be realistic on how many courses to take. To succeed in your courses you need to have the time to study. If you find you don't have time to study and you're not socializing to an extreme, you might want to consider lightening your load. Tips for Saving Time Now that you know how you spend most of your time, take a look at it. Think about what your most important things are. Do you have enough time? Chances are that you do not. Below are some tips on how to schedule and budget your time when it seems you just don't have enough.

Don't be a perfectionist
Trying to be a perfect person sets you up for defeat. Nobody can be perfect. Difficult tasks usually result in avoidance and procrastination. You need to set achievable goals, but they should also be challenging. There will always be people both weaker and stronger than you.

Learn to say no
For example, an acquaintance of yours would like you to see a movie with him tonight. You made social plans for tomorrow with your friends and tonight you were going to study and do laundry. You really are not interested. You want to say no, but you hate turning people down. Politely saying no should become a habit. Saying no frees up time for the things that are most important.

Learn to Prioritize
Prioritizing your responsibilities and engagements is very important. Some people do not know how to prioritize and become procrastinators. A "to do list" places items in order of importance. One method is the ABC list. This list is divided into three sections; a, b, or c. The items placed in the A section are those needed to be done that day. The items placed in the B section need completion within the week. The C section items are those things that need to be done within the month. As the B, C items become more pertinent they are bumped up to the A or B list. Try it or come up with your own method, but do it. 8

Combine several activities

Another suggestion is to combine several activities into one time spot. While commuting to school, listen to taped notes. This allows up to an hour or two a day of good study review. While showering make a mental list of the things that need to be done. When you watch a sit-com, laugh as you pay your bills. These are just suggestions of what you can do to combine your time, but there are many others, above all be creative, and let it work for you.

Conclusion
After scheduling becomes a habit, then you can adjust it. It's better to be precise at first. It is easier to find something to do with extra time then to find extra time to do something. Most importantly, make it work for you. A time schedule that is not personalized and honest is not a time schedule at all.
Self-Development Center SUB I Room 350, 993-2999 George Mason University

Handling Projects
A project is something that is not so simple to plan that you can just quickly put one or two tasks in your to-do list. It requires some thinking about what is to be done and how to go about it. G. Lynne Snead and Joyce Wycoff, in To Do . . . Doing . . . Done! (New York: Fireside, 1997), outline a VPIC model for handling projects (pp. 113-4).

Visualization
First you visualize clearly what is to be accomplished. Imagine some scenarios that represent the final result. Spend a little time, and visualize and get a feeling for what is to happen. For another perspective, you can use the same technique as in Reviewing Life, where you presume you are actually at that point in time when the project is complete. After the images are fairly clear, write a project vision statement. Create a new project section inside your daily planner, or within your scheduling/planning software. Write a description of your visualization. When you write things down, you may get a clearer idea for what is to be accomplished. See whether you can make this statement SMART:

Specific and clear Measurable Achievable, or really doable, given the available time and resources Relevant, closely connected with your or your group's values Time-dimensioned, or scheduled for a specific time period with an end date

Plan
Second, you plan by breaking the project down into manageable pieces. Draw a mind-map of the project (see To Do . . . Doing . . . Done!, pp. 40ff, and 145ff). Take a blank sheet of unlined paper, and draw a

small circle at the center. Then draw a spoke from this circle a short ways toward an edge of the paper, in any direction you like. On this spoke, write word(s) to describe a major facet of the project that first comes to mind. Then draw another spoke from the circle in another direction, and on this line write word(s) describing another major facet of the project. Continue like this until you feel a sense of completion, that you have included all the major parts of the project on that one paper. Now focus on one of the spokes. Does this facet of the project have parts that can be specified. If so, draw a branch from the end of the spoke out closer to an edge of the paper. On this branch, write word(s) describing a part of the original facet. Continue until you have specified all the relevant branches of the spoke starting at the central circle. Do the same thing with the other spokes originating at the circle. Now look at the resulting branches. Continue breaking these down into even smaller branches as necessary, until you have ONLY doable and schedulable tasks nearest the edges of the paper. At this final point you will know everything necessary to complete the project, and it will all be on one piece of paper. Now take a look at the sequencing of tasks to be done. What is to be done first? What is on the critical path, the sequence of tasks upon which all others depend? What tasks must wait until other tasks are done? To clarify the sequence, identify the task or tasks that must be done first, and put a '1' next to it (them). You may have several things that can first be done, and can be done at the same time. Put a '2' next to the second task(s) to be done, etc. After the sequence of tasks is clear, you can prioritze them as A, B, or C. Then you can decide who will do each of the tasks, and how long it will take to do them. Finally, you decide when they are to be done (using either forwardplanning, when no deadline has been set, or backward planning, if you have a rigid deadline--see pp. 159-60 of To Do . . . Doing . . . Done!), and you schedule them in your planner or group schedule (see scheduling tasks). If the project is very complex, you might use a Gantt chart or a PERT chart, quite possibly in software. The tasks will be put directly on your schedule if they have been assigned specific dates; otherwise, put the tasks under a project heading in your software or in a project section in your planner. Based on this mind-map and the schedule, you can determine the budget for the project.

Implement
Third, you implement or execute your plan, using your daily planner and possibly, a Gantt chart, PERT chart, and/or a group project schedule. Follow-up on assignments to see whether they have been accomplished, and remind people as needed. Whenever you do your scheduling for the day (or possibly, for a longer period of time), routinely check your projects and the project timeline and see whether new tasks need to be prioritized, scheduled, and assigned.

Close
Finally, you close and evaluate the project. This is a chance to tie up loose ends, close project files, document results, and learn from what worked and what didn't. You might do a formal analysis by means of a project evaluation or survey. You might celebrate with a completion party.

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Balance Your Breathing

When there's deadline pressure, the situation is always somewhat inflexible and intensely charged, like a carbonated beverage that's been vigorously shaken. One way this pressure shows up is in our breathing patterns. Time pressure always seems to be directly related to an imbalanced way of breathing. So for some immediate relief from anxiety and pressure, you can practice this kind of breathing: Relax and breathe through both nose and mouth with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate a couple of inches behind the front teeth. Set up your environment (or go somewhere) so you won't be disturbed, and then take five minutes to relax into this kind of breathing. This technique is used in many martial arts and has been researched in applied kinesiology. It immediately brings a sense of balance within the energies of pressure and emotion. As a preventative, practice this way of breathing as often as you can remember. After a month or so, your whole energy level and sense of balance and relaxation will change.

Here is a more detailed article, excerpted from the book Kum Nye Relaxation, on this breathing technique:

Kum Nye Breathing

When breathing is consistently calm and even, energy increases, and health improves. We can sleep better. The whole mental and physical organism becomes balanced. The mind becomes lucid, and the body grows alert and sensitive: hearing is clearer, colors are more vibrant, and it is possible to savor more of the flavors of experience. Feeling tones become richer, so certain small things can be enjoyed tremendously, like a little laughter. Once we know how to contact the energy of breath, breathing becomes an infinite source of vitalizing energies. . . . The energy of 'breath' is particularly associated with the throat center, which both evokes energy and coordinates the energy flow throughout the body. It is therefore through the throat center that we can most easily learn to contact and balance the energy of 'breath' and other subtle energies. . . . When the throat center is settled and calm, the energies flow in a balanced and coordinated way: mental and physical energies become integrated, and 'breath' itself is balanced and purified. Usually, however, the throat center is agitated, so these energies become 'blocked' and do not flow properly. It is possible, however, to breathe in such a way that the throat center becomes calm and functions smoothly. The way to do this is to breathe slowly and evenly through both nose and mouth, with the mouth slightly open and the tongue lightly touching the palate [just in back of the front teeth]. In the beginning this is not very comfortable, but as energy begins to travel evenly to the head and heart centers, the vitalizing effects of this way of breathing are felt, and it becomes increasingly easy and 11

pleasant to continue. As the flow of energies within us becomes balanced, our feelings and sensations unfold naturally, and we open to deep sensations of fulfillment. (pp. 35-7, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 1 (Dharma Publishing, 1978, by Tarthang Tulku)) It is important, however, to work continually with the breath, for if you do not, the effects will not last: your body, mind, and senses will slip back into an unbalanced rhythm. So practice this kind of breathing each day for at least three months; twenty to thirty minutes a day is helpful. Try to keep the energy flowing, accumulating and generating it with the breath. (p. 41, Tarthang Tulku, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 1 (Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing))

Identify Pressuring Emotions

As discussed in the article "Where Does Time Pressure Come From?," various situational feelings that we don't want to feel--like fear, guilt, sadness, confusion, or embarassment--can add energy to a work situation, intensifying the 'normal' and often somewhat constant pressure of time flowing. For example, we may feel guilty for not taking care of our part of a team project. You can do the following exercise to explore your relationship to the projects you have and see whether there are situational feelings that are creating pressure. Get an image or symbol for one or more things that you'd like to get done. Just relax and let an image come to mind. You might want to close your eyes to concentrate better. Take the first image that comes to mind and make a note about it so you can remember it. Now ask: What feelings or sensations are associated with the image? What other feelings are associated with the image? What people are associated with the image?

???
Now get a second image or symbol for the same things that you'd like to get done. Just relax and let an image come to mind. Take the first image that comes to mind and make a note about it so you can remember it. Now ask: What feelings or sensations are associated with this image? What other feelings are associated with the image? What people are associated with the image?

???
Now if you take those two images and put them next to each other, what would they say to each other?

???
Finally, ask the following questions about these things that you'd like to get done: If you don't complete the tasks/projects on time, what would happen? If you do complete things on time, what will be the

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result? Why are you motivated? What feelings are involved? Would some of your feelings like to push things away or get rid of something? Would some of your feelings like to get something or draw something closer? Are you confused about something? If you hear yourself saying, I'm really looking forward to . . . ," see whether there's a negative feeling of some kind that you're avoiding by anticipating being done with the job.

Now, after having gotten some clarity on the emotions and feelings associated with your task/project, you can do an exercise that explores different ways of experiencing feelings.

Where Does Time Pressure Come From?

Where does time pressure, and in particular, deadline pressure come from? If we know this, we will probably have some good ideas about how to deal with the pressure. Common responses to the question "Where does the pressure come from?" are: "My boss gave me too much to do!" Or "I don't have enough time to do this in addition to the other stuff I have to get done!" Or "There's not enough time!" We often seem to point at these external causes for the pressure. Our culture teaches that the source of pressure is external: that time pressure, like the flow of time, is somehow built into reality, or built into deadlines themselves. Time pressure is a fact of life that we simply need to adapt to. There's something objectively 'real' about deadline pressure. But we can ask, "Is it true that deadlines always cause pressure? Or is there some other factor at work?" We can look at our personal experience for answers to these questions. In my own experience there were lots of times when I felt pressured under a deadline and was eventually able to turn the whole thing around, changing what I was doing into an enjoyable, not-very-stressful situation, and sometimes going even farther, so that what I was doing became thoroughly enjoyable, what is sometimes called a peak experience. Have you had similar experiences? Take a couple of minutes to recall whether you've had deadline situations where at first you felt considerable pressure (and may even have disliked what you were doing), but after a while things changed somehow so that there was little or no pressure as you worked.

???
If you can recall situations like this from your work life, this seems to indicate that the pressure really isn't built into the deadline; it isn't just an objective reality. (If deadlines always caused pressure, we'd never be able to come up with an example of a deadline where we changed the pressure.) It seems that there's something 'subjective' we sometimes do to change the experience. There's some other way to relate to the deadline that reduces the pressure we feel.

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The Relation Between Pressure and Involvement

Perhaps we could say that the pressure we feel somehow depends on our perspective, on how much we're involved in what we're doing. Let's take a little closer look at the importance of involvement. We have different verbs to indicate the degree to which we're involved in what we're doing. In order of increasing involvement, I can: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. hold back resign myself to doing a job get into it be involved be absorbed or engrossed or preoccupied

At some point in my work I might be 'holding back', which means I have something to do, but for the most part, I'm just resisting it. Perhaps I think about it, but then quickly put it out of my mind. If I get a little more involved, I'll 'resign myself to' doing the job. Basically that seems to mean that I'm not just putting it out of my mind any longer. With a bit more involvement, I 'get into' the job. A bit more involvement, and it's common to say 'I'm involved'. A bit more, and I might say that I'm preoccupied, absorbed, or engrossed. (In general, the word involved literally means 'turned into'. So we could say that one's involvement is measured by the extent to which one's self is 'turned into' the work, or the degree to which one is merged or identified with the work.) Now we can ask, "How does this changing involvement relate to the feeling of pressure?" Take a couple of minutes and ask yourself: If you consider your past experiences of working under pressure, when you got more involved, what happened to the pressure?

???
Based on responses I've gathered to the preceding question, and quite a bit of other research, the best answer to this question seems to be the following principle, which I now use as a working hypothesis: The pressure we feel is directly proportional to how much we're resisting what we're doing. The situation seems similar to what happens when you put your index fingers into the ends of a Chinese finger puzzle (a five-inch-long, woven hollow tube). If you try to quickly pull your fingers out, then there's some pressure, and the puzzle turns into a trap. But if you simply relax, and simply get into the puzzle, moving your fingers closer together (getting more involved), there's no pressure, and the trap opens up. The pressure we feel is directly proportional to how much we're resisting what we're doing. There's an old American adage: "A watched pot never boils." This seems to mean that if you're anxiously waiting for something to happen (you may be waiting for water to boil, or for a stoplight to turn from red to green), time actually seems to perversely slow down. When we take a position apart from what's happening, it seems to affect the way time is experienced. If this is true, it lends more support to my working hypothesis: The pressure we feel is directly proportional to how much we're resisting what we're doing. 14

Whatever formula may be accurate, time pressure depends primarily on our perspective, on the way we relate to the deadline. No matter what external causes we can identify for pressure--e.g., who gave us our tasks, how much we have on our 'plates' of things to do, and how 'little time' we seem to have to finish things--once we take on a job, I believe that the pressure we feel is largely under our control. Even if you don't believe this, or aren't sure about it, wouldn't it be a useful working hypothesis to test out, to challenge yourself with?

Two Factors in Our Perspective

We can take our analysis a step farther. If pressure depends on our perspective, can this 'point-of-view' be broken down into different factors? I have identified two factors: 1. The primary factor is our feeling of time passing (FTP), our ordinary feeling of time flowing in the background of whatever we're doing. This common feeling of time passing is what sets us up for, or predisposes us toward, occasionally feeling deadline pressures, or severe time pressure. This FTP results from resisting past experiences that we didn't like. Repressed negative feelings are transformed into our sense of time flowing. (For more on this, see How Our Sense of Time Flow is Created.) Most people assume that FTP can't be changed (our culture teaches that it's built into 'reality itself'). However, I think that we can dismantle our FTP, and by so doing, actually prevent severe time pressures from ever getting set up. 2. The other factor in our perspective is closely related: Various situational feelings that we don't want to feel--like fear, guilt, sadness, confusion, or embarassment--can add energy to the situation, intensifying the 'normal' and often somewhat constant pressure of time flowing. For example, we may feel guilty for not taking care of our part of a team project. As another example--and this happens quite often--we may be confused because we haven't done conventional time management practices to identify our values and goals and plan and organize our activities. Deadline pressure feels like a trap we're stuck in. Our ordinary feeling of time passing sets the trap; situational feelings of any kind can spring the trap, causing it to close in on us.

Summary
In summary then, time pressure often seems to result from external causes--from having too much work assigned by a supervisor, or from some 'real' lack of clock time, or from the relentless objective flow of time itself. However, a great deal of evidence shows that time pressures depend primarily on our perspective or world-view. The important factors in our world-view are our feeling of time passing (FTP) and situational feelings (including our attitude and confusion about values and goals) that intensify the 'normal' pressure of our FTP.

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How Our Sense of Time Flow is Created

The linear view of time is perhaps the least productive and healthy way to experience time. It usually involves anxiety, pressure, and friction, and a division of awareness between the present job and concern with the future--there's always wasted mental and emotional energy. But how does linear time get set up? The process can be summarized this way: Some feeling begins to arise in awareness. But rather than feel the feeling, we turn away from it. The feeling is repressed or suppressed and we lose a measure of confidence as well as a bit of the natural fulfillment that accompanies being fully involved in our energies. The energy of the heart is lessened and we feel somewhat pressured. Excess energy flows to the head and a sense of detached self-consciousness intensifies as our thinking skips about the separate past, present, and future rooms in our experience. Energy in the area of the throat, which is closely associated with time, becomes agitated as we become anxious and more aware of time passing. We feel more helpless; time becomes more threatening, a greater enemy. There's a dissatisfied sense of self trying to seek satisfaction via various objects and activities. The "time" that is operative in such a lower, constrictive space exhibits some of the characteristics associated with contained gases--the number of interactions increases with a decrease in volume. So our time is characteristically too short and too pressing. We always have to move on. (p. 8, Interview of Tarthang Tulku by Steven Tainer)

Exercises
To check out the single best exercise I know to take the pressure and anxiety out of the way we 'normally' experience time, click here: Breathing exercise. The Clock Watching exercise can show the difference between clock time and our sense of time passing. Lightening Thoughts is a relaxing, slow head rotation exercise that can slow down compulsive thinking and anxiety about time. To break up and slow down the momentum of linear time, try Turn Time Around, or Mental Event Counting. Note: If you have questions or comments about these exercises or readings, please send email to or call Steve Randall at 510-690-0490.

An excerpt from Results in No Time provides some examples about how the American-European perspective of time gets created:
"Timelessness is a natural perspective. Little kids have no feeling of time passing. We learn the habit of experiencing time a certain way, depending on which culture we grow up in. Most of us in the West are 16

so addicted to linear time that we don't know it. Some Western cultures, however--for example, some Native Americans--don't learn to experience time the same way as the rest of us," said Jed. (See Linear vs. Timeless Views.) "This suggests that our perspectives of time are at least somewhat flexible." Michael leaned back and adjusted his napkin. "Do you have any idea of how our sense of time passing is created?" "I can give a couple of examples that shed some light on the process. My wife Becky and I were at the end of a wonderful weekend at a lake in Wisconsin. We had both slowed down to the point where we just timelessly looked out on the lake as the sun went down below a cloak of color. But she had to leave on a business trip that evening. After she packed her bags, we said goodbye. I felt very sad. But rather than deal with the sadness, I started thinking about when we'd be together again, a week later. As we put her things into the car I said, 'I miss you already.' And I actually did feel a bit as though she had already left. Time slipped by quickly as I unsuccessfully tried to savor the last moments with her." "That's very much like the change from timelessness to linear time that I felt when finishing my report a few days ago." "I think what happened was that I avoided the sadness, and then the repressed sadness energy showed up as my intensified feeling of time passing." "So the sadness was somehow transformed into a feeling of time?" "I believe so. It seems that repressed energy like sadness doesn't just disappear, it changes form." Unwitting Creativity Jed continued: "Your example of procrastination while writing a report some days ago is probably another good example of how we create or intensify our SOTP." "SOTP?" "Sorry, sense of time passing. Our group uses the phrase so much we abbreviate it to SOTP." The waiter brought their coffee to the table, and Jed continued. "Did you say that before you procrastinated you were timelessly involved in your report writing?" "Right. I was engrossed, and there was no sense of time passing at all. No conveyor and no sense of past, present, or future." "Then what happened?" "I realized that my favorite TV program was coming on soon, and decided to finish the job after the show." "What happened right before you started thinking about the TV show?" "Not much. I got to a point in my writing where I was stuck." 17

"How did you feel?" "I guess I was confused." "So it's possible that rather than feel confused, you got distracted and started thinking about the TV show." "I think you're right." Then Jed summarized. "So in my case it was sadness, in your case it was confusion, but in either case there was some feeling that we didn't want to feel and attend to. Rather than face the feeling, we started thinking about 'the future', a better future. And soon we ended up being anxiously aware of time passing in the background." "With a divided attention unable to fully appreciate what was right in front of us," Michael added. "Before you procrastinated, there was no SOTP at all. There was no conveyor belt at all, no feeling of past, present, and future. By procrastinating you created the conveyor of time, or at least intensifed its flow." (For a more detailed example of how procrastination intensifies our feelings of time flow, see "Turning Procrastination Around.") "So the energy of the feeling that we don't like is pushed away, and it changes into the experience of time passing between past, present, and future?" "Yes. The energy isn't lost, it's just changed to a different form." "Can you say more about this change?" A Breakdown of the Centers "We can look at it in terms of the head, throat, and heart energy centers. Avoiding the feeling of confusion creates an imbalance in the flow of energy through these three energy centers. (See Tarthang Tulku, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part I (Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1978), pp. 36-8.) The energy flow through the heart center decreases, so we lose some contact with our sensations and feelings. As a result we no longer have the natural fulfillment of full contact with feelings of the heart." "So I don't enjoy the TV show as much as I could?" "Right. And in my example, I have little success appreciating the last minutes with my wife." Jed continued. "The energy flow through the head center increases, showing up as a lot of labeling and thinking about our experience, trying to live in our heads." "So I'm watching TV, but once in a while I think about getting back to my work." "And I am thinking about the next time my wife and I will be together."

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The throat center becomes agitated--then we have the experience of time with a dissatisfied self in the foreground. The waiter brought the bill to the table, and Jed picked it up and went on with his explanation. "The energy flow through the throat center, which is closely associated with our SOTP, becomes agitated. So we then have the experience of time flowing in the background between past, present, and future, with a dissatisfied self in the foreground seeking some kind of satisfaction." "Perhaps by watching TV." "A good example. The self reaches out for satisfaction, looking to other people to fulfill desires, or seeking out special things and activities. The self looks forward to things, but then has difficulty fully appreciating them." "So the commonly perceived structure of time is actually a transformation of energy that we don't like." SOTP Stops Us "And I would go so far as to say that that repressed energy is all that constitutes the common experience of time. The sum total of our SOTP seems to come from having previously resisted these energies." Jed put his credit card on the table and continued. "It's quite a remarkable creation. Something that feels so real, yet is fabricated one small feeling at a time." "That's all there is to it? There's no part of our SOTP that matches a standard external flow of physical time? Isn't our internal flow somehow tracking a 'real' flow rate at which external events occur?" "I don't believe so. The idea of a fixed or constant rate for time is simply part of the linear view that we teach each other, as we discussed earlier. Scientists have never discovered anything like a standard flow of time in nature. ("The flow of time is clearly an inappropriate concept for the description of the physical world that has no past, present and future." Thomas Gold, "Relativity and Time" in The Encyclopedia of Ignorance, ed. R. Duncan and M. Weston-Smith (New York: Pergamon, 1977), p. 100.) In fact these days they say that time is relative to the observer." Michael was silent awhile. "That's very interesting. I guess I've always thought that my SOTP somehow reflected the 'real', constant rate at which all events happen." "Yes, that's what we learn. Then we go even farther and teach that if our SOTP doesn't closely match some imagined rate of events, it's faulty and 'inaccurate'." "I know what you mean. We use the phrase 'losing track of time' to indicate a kind of negligence when our SOTP doesn't 'accurately track' the imagined external flow of time." Michael recalled the previous point. "So the sum total of our SOTP is repressed energy from having resisted things."

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"And unfortunately it's carried forward to whatever we're doing. So I think we can say that our SOTP is a measure of how much we're holding back from whatever we're doing, how much we feel separate from an activity." "Is that another guiding principle?" "Yes. 'SOTP measures how much you're separate from what's happening.' Whenever we find ourselves living out a scenario where time seems like a threat or a drag, the principle can remind us of other possibilities."

A Psychoanalyst's Interpretation of the Origin of Our Perception of Time

"The experience or sense of time, and later the perception of time as an attribute of objective reality, is a function of consciousness. It grows along with consciousness, beginning with the differentiation of the self from the object world.What gradually establishes the sense of time as duration, and more or less coincidentally as temporal perspective, is the felt inadequacy of the self in terms of growing unpleasure and the awareness of the possibility that the need-fulfilling object--mother--may or may not come." (pp. 5-6, Time and Timelessness, by Peter Hartocollis. International Universities Press, Inc., New York, 1983)

The Ending of Pain and Time

In this edited dialog between J. Krishnamurti and David Bohm, Krishnamurti explains how the flow of time starts, and broaches the possibility of ending psychological time: K: Now how am I . . . to be free of time? . . . Can time as thought come to a stop? The memory of experiences, hurts, attachments . . . can come to an end when the very perception asks, what is it? What is hurt? What is psychological damage? The perception of it is the ending of it. Not carrying it over, which is time. The very ending of it is the ending of time. . . . Trying to understand Krishnamurti's proposition, David Bohm focuses the discussion on a specific example of being hurt: DB: The first thing is that there has been a hurt. That is the image [of 'me' being hurt], but at first I don't separate it. I feel identified with it. K: I am that. DB: I am that. But then I draw back, and say that I think there must be a 'me' who can do something. K: Yes, can operate on it. DB: Now that takes time. K: That is time. . . . Let's go slowly into it. I am hurt. That is a fact. Then I separate myself--there is a separation--saying, I will do something about it.

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DB: The 'me' who will do something is different. . . . It projects into the future a different state. K: Yes. I am hurt. There is a separation, a division. The 'me', which is always pursuing the becoming [In this dialog, the word 'becoming' refers to the ego trying to become something], says, I must control it. I must wipe it out. I must act upon it . . . . So this movement of separation is time." (p. 72) DB: . . . A person is thinking that the hurt exists independently of 'me', and I must do something about it. I project into the future the better state and what I will do. . . So I am hurt and I will become non-hurt. Now that very thought maintains the hurt. K: That's right. . . . DB: Now if you don't maintain it, what happens? Suppose you say, I won't go on with this becoming? K: Ah, that is quite a different matter. It means I am no longer thinking, no longer observing, or using time as an observation. DB: You could say that is not your way of looking. It is not your theory any more. K: That's right. . . . DB: Because you could say time is a theory which everybody adopts for psychological purposes. K: Yes. That is the common factor; time is the common factor of man. And we are pointing out time is an illusion . . . DB: Psychological time. K: Of course, that is understood. DB: Are you saying that when we no longer approach this through time, then the hurt does not continue? K: It does not continue, it ends--because you are not becoming anything. DB: In becoming you are always continuing what you are. K: That's right. Continuing what you are, modified . . . DB: If man feels something is out of order psychologically he then brings in the notion of time, and the thought of becoming, and that creates endless problems. [This last statement is from p. 23.] Excerpted from pp. 69-73 of The Ending of Time, by J. Krishnamurti & David Bohm (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985).

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Another Explanation of Time

In the following quotes from Dynamics of Time and Space, Tarthang Tulku uses the word time in a broader sense than just psychological or linear time, as the word is used in the above excerpt from The Ending of Time. With this provision, however, one can see remarkable similarities in content. When we lose contact with time, we have cut the dynamic central to our lives. . . . Subjectively, there is the sense that time is flickering, like a film not properly adjusted on its reel . . . . There is strain that goes nowhere. . . . These structures are in place before consciousness fully forms. . . . they give rise to nervous agitation or uneasy pain . . . . If the momentum of time's forward conducting persists, the agitation and its underlying 'flickering' intensify. Suddenly there is an abrupt break, as if the reel of film . . . had snapped. Everything freezes-movement vanishes. . . . Pain has been transformed into the fixed and rigid structures of linear time. Consciousness emerges into a temporal order in which time is a hostile force . . . . Time in its pastness grinds us down . . . feeding us the lifeless recordings of the past and the seductive fascinations of the future. Caught in this fabricated past and future, we are divided against ourselves. Our knowledge and energy are spread across the linear length of the temporal order. Thus, when we set a goal, we assign a part of our constructed identity to that goal. Now it is as though a part of us was 'out there' in the future along with our projection, pinned against the temporal horizon of the present moment. Increasingly confined, we find it deeply disturbing just to inhabit the successive moments of our lives. . . . The specific 'point' of time that we occupy lacks all capacity to hold time's dynamic. Life goes out of the present, drained away 'across' time. We may respond by withdrawing into a dull numbness that has a quality almost like being shocked or stunned. . . . In our worn-out dullness, we are like a baby that has cried itself into exhausted sleep. If we could awaken at this point to the feeling of pain, we would actually be close to the original dynamic of the time that we have lost. But this alternative is not available, for we are too closely identified with the pain. As 'I' merge with 'having the pain', I become the victim of what objectified time has presented. I possess the pain and am possessed by it; in this feedback I repossess it, tightening its hold. Awareness arises only in the wake of recognition, and so can lead only in the direction of further identification. Accepting the reality of the pain assures its continuation. (pp. 295-7) Through a direct focus on the painness of pain, this ready interpretation can be recast or re-projected. If there is no 'I' as subject--no one making efforts with regard to the pain--there will be no pain to be identified. As pain enters experience and is projected into awareness, it is received without labels and identifications and reactions. There is nothing to be conditioned and no one to be caught. Without the subjective framework, pain is stripped of its solidity.

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. . . In this new arriving of what time presents, the logic of temporality defeats itself. The past is gone, the future not yet arrived, the present too short: 'I' am nowhere. (p. 305)

Linear Time--the Cultural 'Norm'

Linear time is a major feature of our Western cultural world-view, apparently initiated by Newton some 300 years ago. It portrays time as an absolute physical reality, and says that the passage of time is independent of consciousness. So it doesn't matter what you think, feel, or do, or how you look at time, time doesn't change as a result. Of course clock time is a standard that we don't want to change: its continuous measurement of the passage of events enables us to coordinate our activities. But linear time, which is an experiential perspective completely independent of clock time, combines (1) the actual feeling of time slipping from one moment to another, and (2) many different feelings--like overwhelm, pressure, anxiety, hurry, time poverty, frustration, and boredom--that we have as and about time. In the linear view, time flows like a conveyor belt that moves horizontally from past to present to future at the same unchangeable speed for all of us. (See Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life (New York: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 78-9.) Time feels out of our control; we may feel some helplessness, and think we can only adapt to this 'reality'.

<---past

present

future --->

The conveyor passes through three rooms: past, present, and future. We're always in the present room-we take that for granted. We can't go into the future or past rooms because there seems to be an impenetrable divider between the rooms. On the conveyor there is an apparently endless series of containers extending into the past on the one hand and into the future on the other. The way we 'spend our time' is by putting our activities into the containers as the conveyor moves by us. These containers are all the same size, so we can put only so many activities in a given container, then that time is used up, and the container moves into the past. What was put into the containers moves farther and farther into the past, and doesn't seem to affect us.

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Wasting time is not filling the containers as they go by. Since we know that there are a limited number of containers that will pass by during our lifetime, we're anxious about not having enough time. Furthermore, since each container has the same size, what we can accomplish in any time period appears to be limited by the structure of time itself. Racing against the conveyor and trying to overfill containers can lead to overwhelm and burnout. The dividers between the past, present, and future rooms have hazy windows in them. Even though we can't go into the future room, we can look into it through its window. Planning an activity is similar to peering through the hazy window to see how the fuzzy future forms might shape up. We then get an idea of what's 'coming down the pike' toward us on the conveyor. With the experience of time flowing between past, present, and future there is a dissatisfied self 'spending time' in the foreground. The self reaches out for satisfaction, looking to other people to fulfill desires, or seeking out special things and activities. The self 'looks forward to' things, but has difficulty fully appreciating them. What other view of time is possible? See Linear vs. Timeless Views, and the discussion of our "Experience of time" in both 'deadline scenarios' and peak performance in "The Qualities of Deadline Pressure Scenarios." To transform the linear sense of time flowing, see How Our Sense of Time Flow is Created.

Handling Emotions
We can be grateful for our emotions, for our frustrations, fears, and sorrows; they help us to wake up. We have no clearer messages about what is happening in our lives. Our emotions show us where to direct our attention; rather than obscuring the path, they can clarify and sharpen it. (p. 51, Openness Mind, by Tarthang Tulku. Dharma Publishing) The more our awareness increases, the more time we have for positive action; three weeks for the person who is aware are the same as three months for the person who is not. (p. 82, Gesture of Balance, by Tarthang Tulku. Dharma Publishing)

After an emotion has already surfaced, there are two ways to deal with it. One is to objectify the emotional response by blaming someone or something for the way you feel. This way reinforces and escalates negative feelings. The other choice is to go directly into the emotion, become it, discover it, feel it thoroughly, and calmly watch its nature. Rather than ask why, observe how the emotion arises. Instead of trying to push the emotion away, befriend it. If you watch carefully, without involvement, you will see this emotion manifest in both body and mind and then dissolve into pure energy. Just by sitting quietly and watching our emotional state without attachment, we become tranquil. No other instruction is necessary. Agitated, restless feelings are like muddy water, which becomes still and transparently clear when left to stand. As our emotional reaction naturally subsides, mind and body become peaceful and balanced. (pp. 13-14, Hidden Mind of Freedom, by Tarthang Tulku)

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Usually . . . the throat center is agitated, so these energies become 'blocked' and do not flow properly. . . . All emotional extremes and imbalances occur in this state: very heightened emotion, like anger or hate, or severe depression and lack of energy. (pp. 36-8, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 1 (Dharma Publishing, 1978, by Tarthang Tulku)) A particular way of breathing, described in Balance Your Breathing, can help you regain balance when upset; also when practiced extensively and consistently, this type of breathing can build strong awareness that can cut through emotional disturbances as they first arise. Opening Throat Energy, a visualization of warm flowing energy, can dissolve tension and emotions beginning to arise. Three physical exercises that are very effective with emotion are Transforming Energy, Transforming Emotions, and Relieve Your Tension. After gaining some facility in working with emotion, you can do a physical exercise that explores different levels of feeling, and read an example of "Different ways of experiencing a feeling, such as anger." The Mental Event Counting exercise can be very helpful and invigorating way to break up emotional reactions. The Question-Response Process can be an effective inquiry process for getting some clarity on what is happening in emotional or confusing situations. Note: If you have questions or comments about these exercises or readings, please send email to or call Steve Randall at 510-690-0490.

Most of our suffering is psychological, nourished by fear and our identification with the pain. It is important to break down the idea that this is our suffering, our fear. Concentrate on the feeling, not on thoughts about it. Concentrate on the center of the feeling; penetrate into that space. There is a density of energy in that center that is clear and distinct. This energy has great power, and can transmit great clarity. (p. 52, Openness Mind, by Tarthang Tulku. Dharma Publishing)

As discussed in the article "Where Does Time Pressure Come From?," various situational feelings that we don't want to feel--like fear, guilt, sadness, confusion, or embarassment--can add energy to a work situation, intensifying the 'normal' and often somewhat constant pressure of time flowing. For example, we may feel guilty for not taking care of our part of a team project. You can do the following exercise to explore your relationship to the projects you have and see whether there are situational feelings that are creating pressure: Identify Pressuring Emotions

Consider experiences when emotions or mental blocks slow down your sense of time and limit what you can accomplish. What if you could quickly break through those experiences? Consider times when you feel overwhelmed, scattered, or anxious about not having enough time. The quicker you can cut through such feelings and concentrate your energy, the better. How about the feeling that you don't have enough time, that time is slipping through your fingers? These feelings can also be transformed. In general, ordinary experiences of time flowing limit our productivity and appreciation of life. Contrast these with the timelessness of peak experiences: the spontaneous and effortless movements of skiing or playing the piano well, the timeless presence and satisfaction of accomplishing an arduous task, or the peace of meditation. Clearly, timeless experiences are more productive and fulfilling. 25

Could all experience eventually be timeless? Yes, I believe so. My experience indicates that we can transform all of psychological time and create a sense of timelessness right alongside the occurrences of physical time. All that holds us back is our emotional attachments. Feelings repressed or ignored since childhood seem to be all that creates our sense of time passing. --Steve Randall You can read about the role of emotion in creating our sense of time passing: How Our Sense of Time Flow is Created.

Emotions may not have eyes, mouths or stomachs, but they can still suck our energies, hypnotize us, and destroy our natural state of balance. Emotions have the power to lure us into an artificial realm of sensation that is able to gain control of our positive energies. People seem to need emotions, like they need salt for food. But emotions are dangerous and unstable, for what begins as pleasure, often ends up as pain. And when we are in the midst of an emotional situation, we can be blinded by the dynamics of the situation so that our perceptions and perspectives are no longer clear. (pp. 78-9,Gesture of Balance, by Tarthang Tulku. Dharma Publishing) When problems arise in meditation or in daily life, when we are overly emotional or trapped in a pattern of behavior which causes us to suffer, that is the time to practice openness and balance, and to awaken mindfulness. For example, when we are extremely sad or angry, if we concentrate properly on the emotion, looking at it intensely from above and below, and then facing it directly, it can actually disappear--because we see that it is really 'nothing'. With practice, we can quickly balance a depressing or frustrating situation by switching the mind back and forth--making it happy, making it sad, making it happy again--all the time watching what is happening inside ourselves. First, we can do something positive, then something negative. One time, switch the mind to depression and really cry. Then, immediately switch to laughter. What, really, are these emotions? Why should I be controlled by these transitory mental states? This exercise may seem almost schizophrenic, but as we work on it we discover that an important change takes place within our consciousness and in the way we look at ourselves and the world. Sadness is not so serious and happiness is not so frivolous. (pp. 81-2,Gesture of Balance) By means of awareness we can become sensitive to our emotions as they arise and thus begin to break our emotional patterns and our attachments to them. The more our awareness increases, the more time we have for positive action; three weeks for the person who is aware are the same as three months for the person who is not. When we remind ourselves to keep our bodies and minds in harmony with our awareness, we become familiar with every change in our thoughts and moods; and we can remember to bring our awareness immediately into the midst of any situation that could disturb our balance. This practice is like learning to swim; once we learn the first strokes, with practice we will gradually be able to swim--not just for five or ten minutes, but for as long as we like. Similarly, we can develop continuous meditation if we sustain an open attitude in whatever activities we are involved. (pp. 823,Gesture of Balance)

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Determining Priorities
Some people resist determining priorities, but priorities define our lives. Everything we do determines who we are, who we will be, and what we accomplish, and so implicitly or explicitly involves a priority decision--so we might as well be conscious about our choices. "The most interesting people to be around are those who are achieving things that are important to them. When you're focusing on your A objectives, it's impossible to have an apathetic, humdrum life." (p. 258, Manage Your Time, Manage Your Work, Manage Yourself by Merrill E. Douglass and Donna N. Douglass. New York: AMACOM, 1980)

"In each moment we have the opportunity to act on our highest values. Within our present situation and our current responsibilities, we can turn our energy toward goals that really matter to us; we can develop our awareness and cultivate knowledge that benefits everyone. We know from personal experience that using time in meaningful ways is deeply enjoyable; we know that productive work freely carried out satisfies and fulfills our heart and spirit. Acting on this knowledge, we can commit ourselves to making the best possible use of our time. Unless we make that commitment, it is difficult to see how we will ever be able to accomplish much of value." (p. 23, Tarthang Tulku, Mastering Successful Work. Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1994)

If you have not fairly clearly identified your major personal and professional objectives and identified some steps to achieve those objectives, you should do such conventional time management practices. In conjunction with those practices, the following exercises can be helpful in determining priorities:

Question-Response Process, an inquiry process useful for determining goals and priorities Thoughts in Conflict can help resolve conflicts

At a certain point in life, priorities may be determined somewhat by various intellectual guidelines that have been internalized or imposed from without. These guidelines may be expressed as laws or principles of various kinds. They correspond to a dichotomous, linear way of thinking. Later in our development, many more options and directions are available, and clarity, or a feeling of certainty or importance provides the basis for making decisions and determining priorities. Differing degrees of certainty accompany different thoughts and feelings; the strongest sense of certainty (or the least sense of doubt) seems to provide the surest direction.

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Conventional Time Management

Conventional time management (CTM) is about doing the right things, and Inner Time Management (ITM) is about doing things right. The essential CTM skills are to identify long-term goals, break down projects, prioritize tasks, estimate how long it will take to do things, and organize and schedule tasks. You can learn these essential skills by following these links and doing the exercises:

Before working on goals and life directions, it's good to clarify where things are right now. To get a clear and complete picture of your life as it is today, do the Life Patterning Exercise. To see which of your roles in life are being exercised, stressed, or ignored, and to help develop balance among your roles, do the Role Cycling Exercise. To get more perspective on your values and long-range goals and priorities, try Reviewing Life To get a big picture of your objectives in the major areas of life, and to identify and prioritize these objectives, try this exercise: Lifetime Goals in Seven Areas Why should we set priorities and how can we do it? Take a look at Determining Priorities. Once you've determined some projects that you want to accomplish, what do you do? Take a look at Handling Projects. Done identifying tasks? Time for Scheduling

For a description of Results in No Time's conventional time management workshop, see Organizing Your Life-Time.

For a discussion of the scope of time management as well as a comparison of conventional time mangement (CTM) and inner time management (ITM), see "Performance & Well-Being Depend on the Paradigm of Time" and "Three Faces of Time and Time Management."

Life Patterning Exercise

Reserve about an hour of uninterrupted clock time for this exercise. You will need paper and pen or pencil. "In order to rearrange your life to get what you want done, you need a clear picture of your life as it is today. [In order to travel somewhere, you need to know where you are starting. Then you can figure out which way to go.] The object is to put your life--all of it--on one sheet of paper. Then you can scan it at a glance." (The major part of this exercise appears in Get It All Done and Still Be Human, by Tony and Robbie Fanning (Ballantine Books, 1979, pp. 4-11).) Remember that this exercise is about your life as it is now, not as it was sometime in the past, and not as you hope it will be.

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"1. In the center of a blank piece of paper, write the word "Life" and draw a circle around it. Think of the many roles you play each day. As they occur to you, print them on spokes radiating from the center. These roles name the different faces we wear each day, and our relationships with other people and the outside world: father, mother, child, lover, businessperson, friend, runner, shopper, cook, artist, writer, student, teacher." As you do this exercise, if you have interesting insights or feelings about what you're doing, write these down on a separate piece of paper. At this point you may wish to do the Role Cycling Exercise, which can facilitate a sense of balance as you change from one role to another throughout the day.

"2. Once you are satisfied that your major roles are in the pattern, branch out from the roles. Start by naming the activities involved in those roles--whatever pops into your mind. Keep branching away from the center. . . . If you think of another role, put in another spoke from the center. When an activity pops into your mind, insert it as another branch." Once again, if you have insights or feelings about what you're doing, write them down on a separate piece of paper.

Take about twenty minutes, and on another blank piece of paper, do your Wish list: "3. In your Life pattern, you have created an overall view of your life as it is today, with all its important facets. But some things are missing. Nagging away in that small uncomfortable corner at the back of your mind are all those things you've never finished and the things you've never started: your wishes and regrets. "Now is the time to sort them out. What is missing from your life? What, exactly, are you not doing that you wish you were doing or had done? Put it in your Wish list (regrets are only wishes about the past)." Use two columns on your paper, one for things unfinished, one for things unstarted.

"4. Look at your Life pattern. Each of the unfinished/unstarted regrets/wishes you listed in your Wish list fits into it somewhere. You may already have put it into your Life pattern. Add everything you listed under Unfinished and Unstarted to the branches of your Life pattern." If possible, use a different color pen or pencil to add these branches. Again, record any insights or feelings on a separate piece of paper. "If you cannot find a category for something on your Wish list, you need to create a new branch off of your Life expressly for that particular item. Often people spend all their time doing for others and not for themselves. We all need a "personal" or "just for me" branch. Is that what's missing from your Life pattern? Add it, if it is." Now "you have a visual picture of who you are today and what you would like to add to your life." In order to manage our lives, we need to know where our time and energy is going, and all the activities we would like to add to our lives. This picture can give us such a holistic view.

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Finally, check back over the insights and feelings you wrote down while doing the above exercise. Is anything unfinished about them? Do they indicate further activities or projects to add to your pattern and wish list? If so, add them now.

To get an even better picture of your life as it is today, including your current directions and priorities, try the following exercise: Reviewing Life.

Role Cycling Exercise

Set up your environment so you won't be interrupted for ten minutes or so. Sit in a chair, with your back comfortably straight. Close your eyes and visualize the different roles in your life pattern, beginning with one arbitrarily selected, then taking the nearest clockwise role, etc., proceeding around the circle. Keep going around the circle for a predetermined period of time, 5 minutes, for example. Use a timer to keep track of the time so that you can concentrate on the visualizing. Visualize yourself in each role until you get some feeling for it. You may notice relevant thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and sensations in different parts of your body while you visualize. "Observe the complex interrelationship between sensations, 'mind', thoughts, emotions, and body which constitutes 'you in that situation'." (This exercise is similar to exercise 7, "Body-Mind-Thought Interplay," p. 35, of Time, Space, and Knowledge, (Dharma Publishing, 1977, by Tarthang Tulku) from which this quote is taken. The book has suggestions for additional practice with this kind of exercise.) After the timer goes off, record your discoveries.

This exercise should give you a thorough psychic workout, since all the roles and activities of your life are involved. You will get to see what different parts of yourself are exercised, stressed, or wanting attention in the different roles. You might get insights about where you need some healing or growth. Are some of the roles difficult to visualize? Are some connected with primarily negative feelings?

You may do the exercise at different speeds. What happens when you do?

Individual roles may be explored further by visualizing the activities branching off them, just as you did with the roles branching off the center.

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Reviewing Life
Try a different way of getting perspective on your long-range goals and priorities. A way that could cut through wishful thinking and ways of wasting time. First set up your environment so you'll be undisturbed for thirty minutes. At the top of a piece of paper, write "The Life of (your name)." Everything else on the paper will be written in past tense. Keep an open mind, don't expect, hope, fear, or assume anything. Don't be optimistic or pessimistic. Now--suppose it's the day after you died: as much as you can, get into the sense that it is that day. Now look back over 'the past' and make some notes about what happened in your life. Write your notes in the past tense, as if whatever comes to mind really did happen in the past, and you're just remembering it.

Looking Back
Just relax and see whether you can 'remember' what happened in your life. You may not 'remember' right away--but we don't always remember things immediately when we try, do we? Look back towards the past and write in past tense what you see, whatever comes to mind that was accomplished, as well as any insight you realized and any personal changes you see that you went through.

???
After Doing the Exercise
What do you 'remember'? Did you accomplish what you wanted? What happened with your relationships? Did your life take unexpected directions? Did you live the life you wanted to live? Is there greater clarity on your priorities and values in life?

???
Now forget the idea that it's the day after you died. Let go of that idea. Relax and let go of any leftover feelings from doing the exercise, and take ten-fifteen minutes to write down your priorities in life or your long-term goals and objectives, whatever you choose.

???
The exercise presented here is a variant of Exercise 20, "Reversing Temporal Structure," pp. 175-6, in Time, Space, and Knowledge (Tarthang Tulku, Dharma Publishing, 1977). There's a similar exercise called the presum in Get It All Done and Still Be Human, by Tony and Robbie Fanning (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979).

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Lifetime Goals in Seven Areas

This is a process of determining and prioritizing goals and objectives in seven areas of life. You'll identify and record lifetime objectives in seven areas: family, social life, career/service, finances, health, leisure, and spiritual development. Set up your environment so you won't be interrupted for half an hour, and get at least seven sheets of paper. At the top of each sheet write one of the following: family, social life, career/service, finances, health, leisure, and spiritual development. "Now write down everything you can think of that you would like to accomplish in each area during your lifetime. . . . just write down your thoughts.Write quickly, but take as much time as you like."

"When you have listed everything you can think of, review all the items you have noted. Some of them are more important to you than others. Since you are after the best use of your time . . . you need to set priorities." "As you read over the . . . lists of objectives you have prepared, rate them with an ABC system. Put an A beside those items that are very important to you. Put a B beside those that are moderately important, and put a C beside those that are not important at all. You now have a simple priority system. If you were to spend your personal time most effectively, you would concentrate on doing the A activities first [or foremost] and the B activities next, and you would forget about [or simply deemphasize] the C activities."

"You probably have several A items on each list. If you do, rank-order them. Go through each sheet and indicate them A-1, A-2, A-3, and so forth, until all your A activities are ranked."

"Now look to see what item you have ranked A-1 on each sheet. You might list all the A-1 items on a separate sheet of paper and then rank-order them relative to one another. In other words, the various aspects of your life are not equally important. Determine which ones are more important to you than others."

"Do any of your objectives conflict? Many people find, for example, that they are torn between family and career. It's hard to take your son to the ballgame when you could be earning a bonus if you devoted the day to work."

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Scheduling
Once you have identified the tasks you want to accomplish, unless you have a very uncomplicated life, you will probably will benefit from scheduling the tasks. Most businesspeople would find it very difficult to efficiently get everything done without thinking about when various tasks are to be worked on. Furthermore, scheduling gives us an opportunity to coordinate the varied tasks, as well as provide some feedback to see whether we tend to procrastinate. People who have a moderately complex life can usually handle their scheduling needs with some kind of project files (or parts of time management software that will handle project task lists), monthly scheduling calendar (like everything else here, either in hardcopy or software), daily to-do sheets, and a miscellaneous task list. Stationery stores usually carry quite a number of these items in hardcopy. Individual tastes vary--the important thing is to get the pieces of a scheduling system that you need. It will probably take some experimenting to figure out what will work for your particular lifestyle--and even then, things will change, so you'll probably change your time management system occasionally also.

If you have identified your objectives and goals in all areas of life, broken projects down into doable tasks, noted your appointments on monthly and daily to-do calendars, and prioritized everything, you're ready to schedule things. Here's a straightforward way to do it:

Decide for what period of time you will schedule--for a day, three days, a week, two weeks, or whatever seems appropriate. Check your daily, weekly, and/or monthly calendars to see what appointments you have during the period. Change anything necessary. Review your previously scheduled daily, weekly, or monthly to-do list (if there is one), and move uncompleted items onto a blank sheet of paper, or a blank software file without being concerned about the order of the items. Review your project files and decide which tasks are next in line to be completed for the projects. Add those tasks to the blank paper/file without being concerned about the order of the items. Review your miscellaneous items task list and decide what, if anything, should be done during this period. Add any such tasks to the blank paper/file without being concerned about the order of the items. Take the blank paper/file and prioritize the list in terms of A (most important), B, and C (least important). Schedule, or assign to particular dates and times, only the tasks that need to be associated with particular dates/times. And for tasks that are assigned dates, don't assign particular times unless doing so is necessary or helpful for some reason. The remaining tasks on the paper/file are not assigned dates/times, but simply left as a list to be accomplished sometime during the scheduling period. Visualize your day/week/whatever, imagining how things will be accomplished (whether you do them, or someone else does). You may get some insight about how the schedule should be rearranged to be more efficient.

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Plan on the unexpected. Things will probably happen to foil your plans, especially if you schedule things tightly. Unexpected things, like winning the lottery, for example, might actually be helpful. On your calendar, at the end of the scheduled period, put a reminder to schedule tasks again.

How often should you schedule? It depends on your life situation. If you life is uncomplicated, and without many appointments, you might find it best to schedule once every week. A busy manager will typically need to schedule things every day. You might find it useful to schedule up till the time you leave on a trip, or up to a deadline on some project. When should you schedule? Again, it depends. Some people like the morning if they're doing daily scheduling; others like the evening, just before ending their work. If you schedule for a week, you might like doing it on Sunday. In general, if you don't have a clear idea of your priorities, or you don't remember how what you're doing or what you're planning to do fits into a big picture, you probably need to schedule things. And if you're feeling overwhelmed, you may need to do some ITM practices to change the feeling of anxiety or pressure, and/or you may need to schedule/reschedule things. If you have a clear idea of a workable schedule, and if you're really involved in whatever you're doing, there's no need to feel overwhelmed.

Relieve Your Tension

Pressure situations almost always involve conflict. As those of you who already did the Identify Pressuring Emotions exercise may have found, there are often conflicting feelings associated with the tasks you want to accomplish. Although we have a tendency to ignore the conflict, we can do a physical exercise to bring the conflict to center stage, resolve it, and relieve our physical and emotional tension. Throughout this exercise, do the breathing discussed in Balance Your Breathing: breathe through both nose and mouth with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate an inch or two behind the front teeth. (This breathing technique is used in a number of martial arts, and has been researched in applied kinesiology. The technique quickly balances left and right hemispheres and upper and lower body energies.) Now either standing or sitting, put your hands close to your shoulders with your palms facing forward. While imagining that a great force (the pressure of your job, or pressure from co-workers, for example) is pushing against your hands, slowly push the force forward. There should be strong tension in your arms and shoulders, but your belly and the rest of your body can be relaxed. Relax all the muscles you don't need to use. It's as though part of you is balanced and undisturbed within the eye of a tornado while there is strong energy and movement around you. Very slowly keep pushing the force away till your arms are straight out in front. It might take a minute to move your hands from near your shoulders to the point where your arms are fully extended. Then while maintaining the tension, very slowly move your arms back to the starting position. When your hands are back near your shoulders, slowly release the

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tension of the exercise, letting the posture melt. You may feel some tingling or warmth, particularly in your arms, shoulders, and hands. Just keep relaxing for two minutes and attend to the sensations and feelings as they become more subtle. Just feel whatever is happening; keep letting go of the content of thoughts and return to the immediate feeling of what's happening. Trace the sensations as they become more and more subtle over the two minutes. Repeat the exercise twice more--you can get a much greater sense of relaxation and develop greater balance that can prevent pressure from getting set up in the first place. Relax for two minutes after each repetition.

Concentrate Your Energies

As discussed in the article "Where Does Time Pressure Come From?" deadline pressure is proportional to how much we're separate from what we're doing. Pressure is actually a sign that we're resisting what we're doing rather than getting totally involved. The antidote to this is to see how involved you can get in what you're doing. (You could read about different levels of involvement in "Where Does Time Pressure Come From?") Drop any concern about not having enough time and get absorbed in the work. By focusing and holding nothing back, identifying completely with what you're doing so that you're aware of nothing else, your awareness and energy integrate, work becomes peak performance, and your sense of well-being can soar. As you work, periodically see whether some aspect of yourself or something in your awareness is still split off from the activity. Can you bring the energies together somehow? If you can, your productivity and sense of integration will improve a bit more. The exercise described in Exploring Different Levels of Feeling may be helpful in building concentration.

Exploring Different Levels of Feeling

This exercise explores different ways of experiencing feelings, ways that reflect different levels of understanding and relaxation. It also builds confidence, concentration, and awareness. Make sure you have at least ten minutes when you won't be interrupted or distracted, five minutes for the standing exercise and five minutes for thinking and writing. Simply stand with your feet somewhat apart, and hold your arms straight out to your sides at shoulder height. Breathe easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth. (See Breathing Exercise.) Relax all the muscles you don't need to use to hold the posture.

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As you continue, see if the breath becomes ever more even, smooth, and slow. If you have discomfort or negative feeling other than sharp pain, see whether you can continue a while-experiment as Michael did in the excerpt below from Results in No Time. You can breathe into the sensation, find the center of the feeling, and so on. If at some point you have very sharp pain, you might want to end the exercise, possibly trying it again after the pain subsides. After doing the exercise, make some notes about your experience. Note: If you have questions or comments about these exercises or readings, please send email to or call Steve Randall at 510-690-0490.

From Chapter 8 of Results in No Time:

Michael finally found the department store among all the other stores in the shopping center. Ten minutes later he was in Ms. Kumar's section of the store. He walked over to an employee. "Hi. Could you tell me where I can find Jyothi Kumar?" "Yes, she's in the office over there." "Thanks." Michael wended his way among clothing racks. At the door he knocked, then listened. "Come in, please." Michael entered the office. "I'm sorry but it's difficult for me to greet you at the door," said the woman in the wheelchair. "Please come in." "It's nice to meet you, Ms. Kumar. Thank you for meeting with me. Dr. Couvier told me you're an expert on critical points and how they can be used to increase productivity and satisfaction." "Well, she is very generous. I would be happy to discuss critical points with you, but I think it would be more direct if you do an exercise as a basis for our exploration. It may be seem rather abrupt, but would you like to start off with an exercise?" A Critical Exploration "What kind of exercise?" "Just stand and put your arms straight out to the sides at shoulder height." (This is the "Heart Gold Thread" exercise. See Tarthang Tulku's Kum Nye Relaxation, Part II (Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1978), pp. 374-6.) "Like this?" 36

"That's it. This exercise is excellent for showing what goes on with us at critical points. Tell me what you're experiencing." "Well," said Michael, "I'm just standing with my arms out to the side, wondering what this exercise is about." "Okay. I appreciate your willingness to do the exercise. I know it must seem a little strange." "Well . . . yes. It does." "From the look on your face it seems like something has changed." "Yes, my shoulders are a little tired." "Okay," said Jyothi. "See if you can just let the tiredness be there and continue the exercise." "My arms are getting heavy. And my right shoulder is beginning to hurt a little. Can I stop now? What's the purpose of this?" "Please, don't put your arms down. Stay there a while longer. You may be at a critical point now, a point where the scenario suggests a choice of whether to continue with things as they are or do something else. How do you feel?" "Awful. My shoulder hurts a lot. This is dumb. I'm putting my arms down." "Please, Mr. Stewart, stay there a little longer. This is another aspect of a critical point, having a feeling that we consider negative. The negative feeling tends to fragment one's awareness and cause a lot of thinking about how to get away from the feeling. Try to focus lightly on the 'center of the pain'." "What do you mean by 'the center of the pain'?" "Be aware of the pain as if you were a spot of awareness inside the pain itself--rather than the way you've probably been feeling it, as an observer inside your head, and therefore outside of, or separate from the pain." "I'll try it." "While being aware of the pain, breathe lightly through your mouth and nose, inhaling and exhaling gently and evenly. . . ." Michael started the breathing that he was quite familiar with now. Jyothi watched as Michael's expression changed dramatically. "What happened?" "That was interesting. For a short time there, when I went inside the pain, its quality changed. Or maybe I should say that for a while it wasn't painful." "Was there still sensation there?" 37

"Yes, it was as if the same kind of sensation was there, but it just wasn't painful any more." "You might want to let your arms down now." "That was a real breakthrough--almost literally like breaking through something. I think I'll stay with it a while longer. It doesn't hurt, and it's interesting; something's still shifting." Where Is the Self? "When you are inside the pain, where is the sense of self?" "That's a good question," Michael answered. "I'm not sure. Maybe the usual feeling of self isn't there. When 'I' look in a certain way, there is only sensation. . . . I guess it wouldn't be accurate to say that 'I' am aware of sensation, because the normal self isn't part of the experience. . . . The quality of the sensation is continuing to change. Now there's just some tingling and flowing energy. It's like a stream of energy flowing where the pain used to be. As if a dam across a stream had broken, and the water is flowing more freely." "Is it still hard to hold up your arms?" "It's actually easier to hold up my arms than it was when I first started. In fact, it's pretty effortless, as if they stay up by themselves--I don't feel like I'm holding them up." "Sounds like you've gone through what we call the critical point, and the energy is flowing more freely." "I'm noticing that I'm aware of more of my body now, several areas at once. And I feel much clearer than before, as if someone had turned up the lights a bit." "Great. The primary purpose of this exercise is to develop concentration and build awareness." Wholeness Happens "Perhaps we could review what happened at the critical point," Jyothi said as Michael still stood with his arms out to the sides. "First you became aware of the negativity of the pain, and then you noticed that your thoughts were going in a couple of different directions. One direction went toward putting your arms down and ending the suffering. The other direction went toward continuing the exercise, not knowing what was in store for you." "Right. Does a critical point always involve some kind of negative feeling as well as a kind of mental crossroads?" "It seems to. What happened next?" "Well, because you seemed to think there was some benefit in the exercise, I stayed with it. I started breathing through my mouth and nose, as you suggested, and I looked for something that might be called the 'center of the pain'. I guess at some point I relaxed somehow, and the sensation of pain changed. I don't know whether I found the center of the pain, but I no longer felt like a suffering observer outside the pain." 38

"And the negative, painful aspect of the sensation changed." "Right. And the sense of self changed with it. There was only some sensation that seemed in a way like it was underneath the original pain." "Can you describe the change in the experience of self a little further?" "I realize now that before I got into the pain, I felt separate from it without knowing it. I was more like an outside observer, as you said, even though it was in another part of my body." "Have you heard of the principle 'Your SOTP (sense of time passing) measures your separation from whatever you're doing'?" "Yes, Jed Adams introduced me to it. I guess I confirmed it again. When the pain was really strong, I felt really separate from it, and time was really dragging." "Was the sensation still painful when you were not feeling separate from the pain?" "No! It was kind of neutral." "Do you think it's accurate to call the pain a 'negative feeling'?" "It felt negative in the beginning, but when I got into it, it didn't really have any negative quality." "And when you were really absorbed in the experience, you said the energy started flowing, leading to a heightened awareness of what was going on?" "Right. It felt like the energy broke through some kind of blockage in my shoulder. Afterwards my arm and trunk felt more integrated, there were fewer thoughts, and my sense of time flowing lessened. I felt a whole lot better--and more whole." Michael very slowly and sensitively lowered his arms. "What an amazing change that was!" "Can you recall any example from your everyday work life that was similar to this change?" "Well, that was similar in some ways to an experience I discussed with Dr. Couvier, a time when I had a give a speech. The feelings then were different--anxiety and insecurity. But then, as now, the whole scenario changed suddenly, as if from night to day. There was no longer any conflict. I just wanted to be right there, giving my talk. I ended up feeling like I was on top of the world. And my awareness was heightened then, just as it was with this exercise." "Sounds like that was a critical point all right. And it sounds like you handled it well, too." "Thanks. But then I never thought consciously about going into a negative sensation or feeling as you suggested. Maybe it just happened naturally." "Yes. It can do that. But it's probably helpful to know more about what's happening. It seems to make it easier and quicker to work with the process."

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"So when a negative feeling comes up, you lightly focus on it, or try to move your awareness to it?" "Yes. Or you can even think of your awareness as coming from it." "And you stay with the feeling until it changes?" "Yes, try to stay with it until the conflict resolves itself somehow. The different possible choices of what to do seem to arise most quickly when we lightly focus on the feelings involved, rather than thinking about where the feelings came from. Eventually it should become clear that one or more directions would enhance your sense of well-being. Other choices will probably seem less productive." "How can you tell which path to take?" Michael asked. "Clarity seems to come from the scenario itself, not from any kind of rule. You just let the path speak for itself. The important thing is to watch the scenario shifts that happen: first you may observe the feeling from a distant position; then there is only the feeling, with no separation between a self and the feeling; and so on."

Different ways of experiencing a feeling, such as anger:

There seem to be infinitely many ways of relating to experience, and of this range I arbitrarily describe three levels to represent (1) our usual way of experiencing at one end of the range, (2) a level of consciousness in the middle of the range, (3) an enlightened or self-actualized way of experiencing at the other end of the range. (These levels correspond to the three levels described in Time, Space, and Knowledge.) Suppose you are feeling angry. Let's examine the scenario at the above three levels of consciousness. Note that the physical sensation is the same in the description of the experience of all three levels; it is the way the feeling is experienced that is different. At the first level, our usual way of experiencing, the feeling is usually labeled, and is experienced as located in particular places in the body, perhaps in this case in the belly or chest. Also, the experience is one that you have. That is, you, the knower or observer of the feeling, are not identified or merged with the feeling; your sense of self as the knower is outside the feeling, which you have. Your experience of time is linear, usually with one experience at a time. Space is experienced as extended in three dimensions. At the second level of experiencing, there is not simply a labeling of anger, which is thus felt as more immediate, not separated from oneself by a label or thought. The anger is not experienced as so clearly locatable as in the first way of experiencing. Of course, the feeling is in the same physical location, but one experiences the boundaries of the anger to be more open or less definite. One also experiences the surrounding space differently-more open, less separated and container-like; more open, but in a nonextended way. Similarly, the sense of oneself as the observer of the anger is more open. Rather than a highly intellectual way of knowing the anger, for example, there may be a simple, nonverbal observation of it. One may also experience a slowing down of time passing. There may be a strong element of clarity encompassing the anger.

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Finally, at the deepest level of experiencing, there is simply the pure energy of the anger, and no identification of location in the body. There is no feeling of oneself as an observer separate from the feeling. One's awareness is one with the feeling, which has no apparent source, nor anything outside it. There is no sense of time passing, and no experience of space as a container for things and events. Space is simply nonextended openness.

Excerpts from Results in No Time

In early 1996 Dr. Stephen Randall published a book, Results in No Time, to introduce a new vision of work that breaks through all limitations to peak performance in the workplace--including limiting paradigms, systems thinking, and models--and simultaneously optimizes well-being, results, and quality. The first excerpt of the book appears below. To look at a second excerpt, click here.

Michael is the main character in Results in No Time. Michael is a banker on a quest to become an 'optimal worker'--someone who has mastered all aspects of work. Recently he heard about a newspaper reporter named Jed Adams who might be an optimal worker. He arranged a lunchtime meeting with Jed .... At Jed's office, Michael introduced himself to Adams, took off his jacket, and said, "When I called the newspaper, the person at the switchboard called you a 'timeless worker'. Why is that?" "Well," Jed replied, "I'm fascinated by timelessness, whether within work life or not. It's a lodestar. A nonpersonal guide, a virtue, an integral aspect of masterful living. A facet of all peak experiences. My deepest experiences always have a timeless quality, never a 'normal' experience of time flowing." With a bit of confusion, Michael said, "They don't have an experience of time flowing?" "No, the best 'times' are actually 'timelessnesses', occasions that have little or no feeling of time passing relentlessly and out of control from past to present to future." Michael looked up toward the wall. "Hmmm, I'm not sure I ever really thought about that." "How about you, Michael? What is the quality of time or timelessness within the best episodes of your life?"

Timelessness and Effortless Flow

Michael sorted through a number of memorable occasions, then settled on one: "I recall being at the beach one wonderfully warm vacation day, lying peacefully on my blanket, just listening to the waves and watching the clouds. I was really relaxed, not a care in the world. I was just there, unaware of time, not feeling pressured by what was next on the schedule." "So you weren't aware of time passing?"

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"No," said Michael between munches on his sandwich. "Or at least not much--even though I was probably there for hours." Jed opened a small refrigerator in the corner of his office. "Would you like something to drink?" "Yes, thanks. One of those mineral waters would be great." Another memorable 'high experience' drew Michael's attention. "There was another occasion when I was working at the bank, preparing documents for the end-of-year tax filing. I had a great deal to do, but I got into it, and after a while it just seemed like everything went by itself. Everything fell in line, with no effort on my part. It was exhilarating." "Were you aware of time passing?" Jed asked. "Well, I'm not sure. There was a lot of activity, but I wasn't struggling against some momentum of time the way I often do. And there was no sense of past, present, or future." [To the reader: In the examples of peak experience that you can think of, did you conclude that 'time passed quickly'? If so, consider this: Did time 'really' flow quickly, or was it only after some uninterrupted activity during which there was no feeling of time that you came out of the activity, looked at a clock, remembered when you started, and then interpreted that 'the time' must have flown?] "Can you say more?" "Things flowed in a way that was enjoyable and exhilarating, rather than with the typical anxiety and pressure. Maybe I was so engrossed in what was happening that there was no room for time." "And you said things went effortlessly?" "Yes, as if I wasn't there. And as if the usual resistance in getting things done just wasn't there." "Your experience reminds me of the eye of a hurricane. A hurricane can give the appearance that a lot is happening, yet there is no disturbance within the whirlwind of activity--like nothing is happening." "That's a good analogy. I wasn't struggling with my work in the typical race against time. There was no one disturbed within the whirlwind of tax preparation." "So, Michael, if we understand the word timeless to mean 'without the common feeling of time flowing from past to present to future,' then even though this peak experience of yours had lots of action, it looks like an example of timeless activity." "I guess so." "Your example matches what everyone else I've talked to has said. The best 'times' of life seem to have a timeless facet. The usual friction of time just isn't there. In addition, the example illustrates another virtue, which the people in a research group that I belong to call 'unobstructed flow'." "You mean the effortless, uncontrolled energy of the check sorting?" Michael asked. 42

"Exactly." Adams took a drink.

The Best Results Appear in No Time

"But getting back to your original question of why some co-workers call me a 'timeless worker'," said Adams, "as we've discussed, the best of everything seems to be timeless. And that includes my best work. When I'm at my best, I don't experience time passing. And I talk about this so much around here that they call me a 'timeless worker'." "I see." "Did you notice that plaque?" Jed pointed to the side wall.

Michael squinted and read aloud: "When working, you get the best results in no time." Jed leaned back in his seat. "This guiding principle has been very useful for some of us here. If we notice a sense of time flowing in the background of experience, we know that our work is not optimal, not what it could be."

Second Excerpt from Results in No Time

Michael is the main character in Results in No Time. Michael is a banker on a quest to become an 'optimal worker'--someone who has mastered all aspects of work. Recently he heard about a newspaper reporter named Jed Adams who might be an optimal worker. He is now meeting with Jed for the second time . . .

Dinner With a Choice of Views

Michael Stewart and Jed Adams sat down at their table in the restaurant. "As I said before we parted last time, I'd like to learn more about 'timelessness' and 'linear time'. Would you tell me what you mean by 'linear time'?" "Linear time is a feature of our Western cultural view of things. This world-view was apparently initiated by Newton some 300 years ago. It portrays time as an absolute physical reality, and says that the passage of time is independent of consciousness." "What do you mean by, 'Time is independent of consciousness'?" 43

"It doesn't matter what you think, feel, or do, or how you look at time, time doesn't change as a result." Michael thought a while. "To me, that sounds like the way time should work. If clock time was relative, it wouldn't be useful. A standard measurement of time makes it possible to coordinate our activities by knowing what time it is no matter where we are on the globe." "I agree with you. But there is much more to time than clock time's abstract indexing of physical events. Time isn't just a conceptual structure. It's also a felt experience. In fact, it's a wide variety of experiences."

The River of Time

Jed looked out at the Mississippi. "In our culture most temporal experiences can be represented by four metaphors. In the first, time is a river, and we're caught in the current. We feel out of control, helpless and unable to change time's relentless flow." "Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the number of things to do and keep up with. Is that the kind of thing you mean?" "That's part of it," Jed replied. "Linear time is a kind of combination of the actual feeling we have of time slipping from one moment to another, and all these feelings--like overwhelm and anxiety--that we have about time." "Your phrase 'slipping from one moment to another' reminds me of an experience I had a few days ago. I was watching my favorite TV show, but I could hardly enjoy the show because I just kept thinking about a report I had to finish after the show was over. The feeling of time passing was really strong. And when I was working on the report before the show began, I had one of those great timeless experiences, too. The contrast between timelessness and the river of time was stark."

The Conveyor Belt

"So this river of time is one image of linear time," Jed continued. "In a similar image time is like a horizontal conveyor belt that moves from past to present to future at the same unchangeable speed for all of us." (Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life (New York: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 78-9.) "And it doesn't matter what we think or feel or do?" "Right. That impression is part of all these images of the linear view. With the conveyor belt, as with the river of time, we feel out of control, helpless and unable to change time's relentless movement. Anxiety and pressure about time are 'facts of life'." "Do these feelings seem unchangeable because we presume that time is independent of us?" "Yes. Then we can only try to adapt to time. It appears to us as unchangeable."

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The Treadmill
They ordered from the menu, then Jed continued. "Sometimes time's conveyor seems like a treadmill that we're on. Everything's boring and repetitious. It feels like a drag. Maybe it even feels purposeless, like it's not going anywhere." "I'm familiar with that. Sometimes it seems like the best I can do is keep up with things. It's impossible to get ahead, but I can't get out of the rat race." "Yes, life can appear to be an endless series of challenges that we can't escape." "That's three different images of linear time. Any more?" Michael asked as the waiter brought bread to the table.

The Hourglass
"There's an hourglass metaphor. When we're born we're given an hourglass full of the sands of time. With a normal hourglass, after the sand runs into the bottom half, we turn the hourglass upside down, and then we can measure out more time. But it seems like our hourglasses are broken at the bottom. So the sand runs out and we try to catch it, but it just slips through our fingers."

"I'm familiar with that feeling also. It's like time's running out. We don't have enough of it." "Right. We're anxious, and sometimes there's fear--we might even be afraid of death. This image portrays very well our feeling that time is limited."

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Winning the Battle Against Time

"With all these views, time seems like an enemy, something we're struggling against," Michael observed. "Yes, the struggle or race against time is built into all these images of the linear view." "This may be a dumb question, but do you see any way to win this battle?" "No. But we have various tricks that we use to try to win. Procrastination is one. Procrastinating is like swimming at right angles to the current in the river of time, getting up on the bank, and then watching time roll by." "But when I procrastinate," Michael said, "as I did with my report the other night, things get worse. I couldn't enjoy watching TV." "Yes, it's impossible to enjoy things deeply without being fully involved. And you also said it worsened your experience of time. Using the weapon of procrastination in our struggle with time has drawbacks." "So that doesn't help. What about all the time management practices? I've been using them for years now, and they've been helpful." "Yes, they can be helpful, even necessary. I use time management techniques too, but by themselves they don't win the struggle against time." "What do you mean?" "Time management is usually done within the struggle with linear time. We make our to-do lists, prioritize, delegate, look at papers only once, and so on--all while we feel pressure and anxiety about time flowing in the background. Time management doesn't directly address our felt experience of struggling with time." "Could you say more?" "Time management 'believes in' the images of the river, conveyor, hourglass, and treadmill. It usually presumes that the river of time really does flow between past, present, and future, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. It just offers us different ways to tread water as we're swept downstream by the current." Michael made a discouraged face. "It sounds pretty futile." "By itself time management doesn't seem to provide much leverage in our struggle. We don't get any closer to the center of the circle, no closer to timelessness. But as I said before, it can be very helpful if combined with ways of dealing with linear time directly."

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'Seeing Through' Time's Persuasiveness

"Well, if we can't win the battle against time, do we just resign ourselves to endless struggling?" "No, and we don't need to give up either. Struggling and giving up still presume that the images of the linear view are 'real'. They still believe in the 'truth' of the images." "They're not true?" "These are all more-or-less-convincing views, not 'the reality' about time, or 'the way things are', even though a built-in part of the images is the message that 'this is the way time is, and it can't be changed'." "What are our options?"

The Habit of Time

"As we discussed at our first meeting, the timeless perspective of peak experience seems to be the best option. Timelessness is a natural perspective. Little kids have no feeling of time passing. We learn the habit of experiencing time a certain way, depending on which culture we grow up in. Most of us in the West are so addicted to linear time that we don't know it. Some Western cultures, however--for example, some Native Americans--don't learn to experience time the same way as the rest of us." (Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life (New York: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 27-40.) "This suggests that our perspectives of time are at least somewhat flexible." Michael leaned back and adjusted his napkin. "Do you have any idea of how our sense of time passing is created?" "I can give a couple of examples that shed some light on the process. My wife Becky and I were at the end of a wonderful weekend at a lake in Wisconsin. We had both slowed down to the point where we just timelessly looked out on the lake as the sun went down below a cloak of color. But she had to leave on a business trip that evening. After she packed her bags, we said goodbye. I felt very sad. But rather than deal with the sadness, I started thinking about when we'd be together again, a week later. As we put her things into the car I said, 'I miss you already.' And I actually did feel a bit as though she had already left. Time slipped by quickly as I unsuccessfully tried to savor the last moments with her." "That's very much like the change from timelessness to linear time that I felt when finishing a report a few days ago." "I think what happened was that I avoided the sadness, and then the repressed sadness energy showed up as my intensified feeling of time passing." "So the sadness was somehow transformed into a feeling of time?" "I believe so. It seems that repressed energy like sadness doesn't just disappear, it changes form."

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Unwitting Creativity
Jed continued: "Your example of procrastination while writing your report some days ago is probably another good example of how we create or intensify our SOTP." "SOTP?" "Sorry, sense of time passing. I use the phrase so much I abbreviate it to SOTP." The waiter brought their coffee to the table, and Jed continued. "Did you say that before you procrastinated you were timelessly involved in your report writing?" "Right. I was engrossed, and there was no sense of time passing at all. No sense of past, present, or future." "Then what happened?" "I realized that my favorite TV program was coming on soon, and decided to finish the job after the show." "What happened right before you started thinking about the TV show?" "Not much. I got to a point in my writing where I was stuck." "How did you feel?" "I guess I was confused." "So it's possible that rather than feel confused, you got distracted and started thinking about the TV show." "I think you're right." Then Jed summarized. "So in my case it was sadness, in your case it was confusion, but in either case there was some feeling that we didn't want to feel and attend to. Rather than face the feeling, we started thinking about 'the future', a better future. And soon we ended up anxiously aware of time passing in the background." "With a divided attention unable to fully appreciate what was right in front of us," Michael added. "Before you procrastinated, there was no SOTP at all. There was no conveyor belt at all, no feeling of past, present, and future. By procrastinating you created the conveyor of time, or at least intensifed time's flow." "So the energy of the feeling that we don't like is pushed away, and it changes into the experience of time passing between past, present, and future?"

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"Yes. The energy isn't lost, it's just changed to a different form."

SOTP Stops Us
"And I would go so far as to say that that repressed energy is all that constitutes the common experience of time. The sum total of our SOTP seems to come from having previously resisted these energies." Jed put his credit card on the table and continued. "It's quite a remarkable creation. Something that feels so real, yet is fabricated one small feeling at a time." "That's all there is to it? There's no part of our SOTP that matches a standard external flow of physical time? Isn't our internal flow somehow tracking a 'real' flow rate at which external events occur?" "I don't believe so. The idea of a fixed or constant rate for time is simply part of the linear view that we teach each other, as we discussed earlier. Scientists have never discovered anything like a standard flow of time in nature. In fact these days they say that time is relative to the observer." Michael was silent awhile. "That's very interesting. I guess I've always thought that my SOTP somehow reflected the 'real', constant rate at which all events happen." "Yes, that's what we learn. Then we go even farther and teach that if our SOTP doesn't closely match some imagined rate of events, it's faulty and 'inaccurate'." "I know what you mean. We use the phrase 'losing track of time' to indicate a kind of negligence when our SOTP doesn't 'accurately track' the imagined external rate of time." Michael recalled the previous point. "So the sum total of our SOTP is repressed energy from having resisted things." "And unfortunately it's carried forward to whatever we're doing. So I think we can say that our SOTP is a measure of how much we're holding back from whatever we're doing, how much we feel separate from an activity." "Is that what you call a 'guiding principle'?"

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"Yes. 'SOTP measures how much you're separate from what's happening.' Whenever we find ourselves living out a scenario where time seems like a threat or a drag, the principle can remind us of other possibilities." "I guess it could remind us that our situation can be improved if we somehow move toward timelessness." "Yes." Jed signed the charge slip. "On the other hand, if we're always in timelessness, how can we meet deadlines, or make appointments and keep them? Especially people like you for whom deadlines are a way of life?"

SOTP Vs. SOT

"There's a difference between our 'sense of time' and our SOTP. I have a great SOT, or sense of time. That is, I am good at guessing the position of the clock's hands--what the clock time is--and use the information to meet my deadlines. But having a good sense of time doesn't mean that I must feel time passing. There's a difference between the actual sensation of time flowing and thoughts about clock time that just index events of our lives." "So you're saying that your feeling of time passing, or SOTP, is different from your sense of time, which is just the ability to know the current clock time?" "Yes," Adams said. "I heard about an open-heart surgeon who is probably timelessly involved as he concentrates on the extremely difficult surgery. Yet while he concentrates it is necessary for him to know clock time so that he can move from one operating room to another and coordinate his part of the work with others who prepare the patients for him. While engrossed he can still tell time 'with only half a minute margin of error, without consulting a watch'." (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), p. 66.) "That's amazing." "Maybe it shows what is possible for us. It's important to recognize the difference between our SOT and SOTP. SOTP is a measure of our lack of involvement; it shows how separate we are from whatever we're doing." "So ideally it will gradually disappear, or transform toward timelessness." "Yes. But our SOT is quite useful, and we should not confuse it with our SOTP. If we do, we might try to ignore watches and clocks and stop thinking about the past and future." "That would make it really hard to get along in modern society." Michael summarized: "So ideally we would keep or even improve our SOT while dismantling our SOTP." "Exactly. And that's what seems to happen as we move to excellence."

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Turn Time Around

We feel pressured and anxious when we think about a future time when a project is due. This pressure and anxiety occur because over years we have developed a habitual way of looking at the future, a way that can be called the 'pressure perspective': we occupy a point in time we call 'the present', and we look from this point to a somewhat distant segment of time called 'the future', which contains the time that is relentlessly closing in on us here in the present with a speed that seems unchangeable. In other words, "First we pick out a point situated 'up ahead' in time, then we measure the distance to that point, then we react to this situated point." (p. 93, Dynamics of Time and Space) (There are innumerable other perspectives: read, for example, about the experience of time during peak experiences in "The Qualities of Deadline Pressure Scenarios.") What if we tried to loosen up this rigid way of looking forward to things by viewing from the future back? Would that relieve some of the pressure and anxiety? Try it and find out! Following are descriptions for three ways this exercise can be done:

Reversing Temporal Structure

Try a different way of looking at the rest of the project. Suppose it's the day after the deadline (or some arbitrary future day): don't just pretend, but as much as you can, get into the sense that it is that day. Now look back over 'the past' and make a few notes about what happened on the project up till this day. Write your notes in the past tense, as if whatever comes to mind really did happen in the past, and you're just remembering it. How does looking back after the past events feel? Does it relieve the pressure, anxiety, and sense of urgency that you felt before? Do you get any insight about unexpected directions that the project took? Following is a more detailed description of this technique that can also be used for general planning purposes, or as an antidote for procrastination: The exercise presented here is from Appendix A of Results in No Time, and is a variant of Exercise 20, "Reversing Temporal Structure," pp. 175-6, in Time, Space, and Knowledge (Tarthang Tulku, Dharma Publishing, 1977). There's a similar exercise called the presum in Get It All Done and Still Be Human, by Tony and Robbie Fanning (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979).

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Setting Up the Exercise

This exercise can turn your usual temporal perspective around and allow more of the timelessness of peak performance to shine through. What you'll do first is to pick the most important project that you're currently working on--or procrastinating about. Or if deadline pressure is bothering you, pick a project for which you're feeling considerable pressure. Second, you'll assume that it's some particular time in the future, for example, a month from now, and then you'll write down in past tense whatever comes to mind about what happend on the project during the past month. Actually you can choose any future date and substitute that for "one month from today" in these instructions. If you're working with a project on a deadline, you could pick some time shortly after the deadline. So first identify the project that will be most important in your life during the next month. Or pick a project you've been procrastinating about, or a project for which you have a deadline. Got one project in mind?

???
Now set up your environment so you'll be undisturbed for twenty minutes. At the top of a piece of paper, write the date as if it were one month from today (or whatever other date you choose). Then just as a reminder, write down a few words generally describing the project you've selected. Everything else on the paper will be written in past tense, since you are recording what alrea4y happened. Keep an open mind, don't expect, hope, fear, or assume anything. Don't be optimistic or pessimistic. Just relax and see whether you can 'remember' what happened on your project during the past month. You may not 'remember' right away--but we don't always remember things immediately when we try, do we?

Looking Back
Look back towards the past and write in past tense what you see. Write whatever you remember was accomplished, as well as any insight you realized and any personal changes you see that you went through.

???
About Doing the Exercise
After you feel that the exercise is complete, take a few more minutes and write down how you experienced it. Did anything interesting happen? Did you get any insights or creative ideas? Did you enjoy doing the exercise? Did you get a sense of completion and satisfaction? Was it different from your typical way of planning or thinking about doing projects?

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Other Ways To Do the Exercise

This exercise may be done with other time periods--like a week, three months, or a year--or you may simply assume it's a given date and look back from there. Instead of making a daily "to-do list," you can effectively use this exercise to write a "done list" for the day. Rather than have to switch back and forth between writing and remembering what happened, you may prefer to use a tape recorder or dictate to a friend. When doing the exercise you may get images or scenes which can be sketched and included with your writing. And finally, if after doing the exercise you do not find the results you anticipated, you can do it again from a point of view further in the future.

About Changing Perspective

You may get a sense of relief, peace, presence, or rest--even if the project didn't appear to be completed. Why? Most of our lives seem to be spent trying to get to goals up ahead, in the future. We expect that we'll be happier later on, after we complete that project. But the quality of our experience--the natural fulfillment that is available no matter what we're doing--is depreciated by a habitual perspective of looking forward to things. When we change our habitual perspective on time, we break through this temporal structure of seeking happiness somewhere else. Then instead of fighting against time, trying to get to our goals, we can just be here in peace and presence. We can, if only for a brief timelessness, be here instead of trying to get there. The usual linear view of time (See Linear vs. Timeless Views), with its constant flow of time and efforts to seek satisfaction, is unnecessary, full of anxiety, and unhealthy. By doing exercises like this one we can eventually completely transform our sense of time passing. Note: This exercise helps to dissolve the opaque boundary we experience between present and future. After working with it awhile, you can take this dismantling a step farther by practicing Exercises 20 and 21 from the book Time, Space, and Knowledge. Copyright 1996 by Steve Randall, Ph.D.

Here's a way to break up the habitual 'pressure perspective' by repeatedly looking from the present back towards the past:

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From the present, relax and look back in time and let some memory arise, a memory of anything at all. When the memory dissipates, and you're back to 'the present', relax and let another memory arise. When that dissipates, and you're back to 'the present', let another arise. Keep going for five minutes or so.

???
After doing this, notice how you feel. Is there any relief from the habit of looking foward? A sense of relaxation, contentment, or presence that wasn't there before? Could such a sense of peacefulness be partly the result of breaking the habit of trying to get ahead, and looking forward to things? This exercise is a variant of Exercise 22, "Diving into Time," p. 177, in Time, Space, and Knowledge (Tarthang Tulku, Dharma Publishing, 1977).

Here's a way to break up the habitual 'pressure perspective' by diving farther and farther back into the past: From the present, look back at a previous deadline, either with this project or another project. Find another one farther back in the past. Another, farther back. Another. Etc.

???
After doing this for a few minutes, notice how you feel. Is there any relief from the habit of looking foward? A sense of relaxation, contentment, or presence that wasn't there before? Could such a sense of peacefulness be partly the result of breaking the habit of trying to get ahead, and looking forward to things? This exercise is a variant of Exercise 22, "Diving into Time," p. 177, in Time, Space, and Knowledge (Tarthang Tulku, Dharma Publishing, 1977).

Qualities of Deadline Pressure Scenarios

Comparing Deadline Pressure Scenarios to Peak Performance with Regard to Experience of Time, Effort, Well-being, and Time Estimation
When there's deadline pressure, the situation is always somewhat inflexible and intensely charged, like a carbonated beverage that's been vigorously shaken. So all the keys to releasing the pressure loosen up this structure in some way.

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Before trying the exercises for releasing time pressure, it can be helpful to understand exactly what you're dealing with. Following is a description of a typical deadline scenario. See whether this fits your experience of working under a deadline: 1. Experience of time Time is felt to flow among three rooms in experience, from past to present to future at a constant and uncontrollable rate, no matter what you do or think. You may struggle or race against time, but nothing that you do can slow time down. (This is one aspect of a perspective called linear time. See also Linear vs. Timeless Views.) Occasionally you look toward a distant future deadline. The deadline is relentlessly coming closer, and there's nothing you can do to slow it down. Every time you think about the deadline closing in on you, there's anxiety and pressure, because you 'realistically' might not have enough time to get the work done on time. You may struggle or race against time, but nothing that you do can slow time down. Does this match your experience of working under deadline pressure? 2. Well-being There's dissatisfaction or a lack of fulfillment here in the present. It might feel like you are being squeezed or confined, overwhelmed, or there might even be a sense of impending doom. Since the feelings are so unpleasant, there's a tendency to look forward to a better time after the deadline. 3. Effort The work feels stressful and takes quite a bit of effort. You might fear that it's gradually wearing you down to the point where you could get sick. 4. Clock time estimation It's as if the river of time carries equal sized containers for our activities. Equal units of clock time seem to hold equal and limited potential for accomplishing things. (This is one aspect of a perspective called linear time. See also Linear vs. Timeless Views.) Estimating how long it will take to finish the task is based on the perception of equal capacity/unit of time, as well as past experiences of how long it took to accomplish similar things. (Thus your work capacity-how much you can accomplish in a given period of clock time-seems fixed.) This way of estimating time seems fairly reliable.

Identifying Qualities of Peak Productivity

Now that you've got more clarity on the situation you're starting with, to get a sense for the ideal way that this pressure scenario can change, you can explore the qualities of peak productivity under a deadline, when you are in what is sometimes called 'the zone'. Take a minute to recall three projects during which you worked under a deadline and performed at your best for a while. When at your best, how did you experience time/timelessness? How was your sense of well-being? Was there effort involved in the work? After thinking about this, and perhaps making some notes on your conclusions, you could check out Linear vs. Timeless Views.

Description of Facets of Optimal Work from Research Literature

Now see whether the following description (from peak performance research) fits your memories of optimal work:

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1. Experience of time Only during breaks do you feel time flowing from past to present to future. During peak work performance you're so absorbed in what you're doing there's no awareness of time flowing (80% probability, according to surveys I've conducted with about 2000 people). If you had to describe your experience of time, most likely you'd say it was timeless. On the other hand, you might (20% probability) say that time was going very quickly, yet it wasn't making you anxious with its passing. Time certainly doesn't feel out of control, and you're not trying to race against it. (See Linear vs. Timeless Views.) In general you don't feel a lack of time--you just concentrate on what you're doing, which is going very well. You occasionally plans and think about the deadline, but this thinking doesn't cause much anxiety or pressure. (Thinking about clock time doesn't necessarily involve time flow or pressure!) 2. Well-being There's very little sense of dissatisfaction; in fact you probably feel invigorated, whole, and happy with the way things are going. As you work, you might occasionally think of the fact that the task isn't done, but this is very inconsequential. You're not worrying about not being done, nor are you looking foward to being done because that will be a better time than the present. The important thing is that you're really involved in what you're doing--you're getting results and having a good time by being engrossed. 3. Effort The work may be requiring mental or physical energy, but it doesn't feel very stressed. The work might even seem to be effortless in a sense, flowing with a momentum of its own. You may not feel separate from the activity. Like being in the eye of a hurricane, there can be a sense of presence and peacefulness even in the midst of quick or physically demanding activity. 4. Clock time estimation Instead of flowing in a fixed and relentless way, with equal-sized containers, time seems very flexible and changeable, even unpredictable. Occasionally you check your progress and estimate whether you'll be able to finish on time. But you don't take these estimates very seriously, partly because time doesn't seem very real during this peak experience, and partly because you know these estimates proved inaccurate so many times before. There's a sense of everpresent opportunity and possibility: perhaps, for example, you'll get some insight on how the work process can be improved.

Is Pressure Really Unchangeable in a Deadline Scenario?

There's a big difference between these four factors in the two scenarios. Productivity is clearly different. Feeling pressured, anxious, hurried, and overwhelmed are part of deadline scenarios, but never part of the views during peak performance. At this point, a good question to ask is, "In a deadline scenario is there anything that keeps it from becoming a peak experience?" Is there anything you know of that keeps a deadline scenario from changing into a peak experience? Really look to see whether anything seems absolutely unchangeable. As long as I'm willing to learn from what I'm doing and I'm sensitively noticing how I'm working, it seems that the pressure eventually changes. Apparently there's nothing really fixed about pressure situations. Pressure doesn't seem to be built into certain jobs; I think it is somehow added to neutral situations because of our attitude, perspective, or confusion about values and goals. For more on this, read the following quotes from Coping with Executive Stress, by Richard E. Winter, M.D. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. 56

Stress, however inevitable, nevertheless is widely misunderstood. No concept dealing with human functioning and health has produced more confusion. According to conventional wisdom, stress is to be avoided if at all possible. But it cannot be. And even if it were, its avoidance would probably be calamitous to the individual and to society. The need is not for stress evasion but for effective ways of coping with stress. p. 1 There is growing conviction among many investigators that how people cope with stress is far more important than the frequency and severity of stress episodes. Some people cope remarkably well-almost as if by instinct. p. 15 Stress is neither good nor bad in itself. The effects of stress are not determined by stress itself, but by how we view and handle the stress, by how we appraise and adapt to an event. p. 169 However much the stress of executive work is . . . it is not, in the final analysis, the stress itself which causes problems. It is how one reacts to the stress. The fundamental concept is, you don't have to respond with distress; you can teach yourself not to. You can, indeed, learn to cope.

Linear vs. Timeless Views

A Comparison of Two Perspectives
The following two perspectives, in the second and third columns, do not mix--at any time only one perspective occurs. We are constantly choosing between perspectives and determining which is more likely to show up in the future. Our current work capacity is largely determined by such choices made in the past. Names for perspective Sense of clock time Felt extension of time 'Normal experience, or linear Peak experience, the 'zone', or third level time, or first level Clock time is independent of perspective for all practical purposes Time is linear, extending continuouosly from past to present to future; we experience time duration, how long things last Time is a series of transactions felt to pass or flow constantly and continuously Typical feelings centered around self: lack of control, helplessness, pressure, anxiety, fear of death, overwhelm, hurried, time poverty, boredom, frustration Dissatisfaction; seeking by separate self because of a sense of something lacking Time is not felt to extend or be linear; there's timelessness, no felt duration

Flow of time

Health and well-being

There's an abiding presence amidst movement, no experienced flow, though physical and mental events still happen None of feelings at first level: there may be physical or mental effort without experienced stress or lack of control Fulfillment, sense of well-being and wholeness; self is absorbed, engrossed in what's at hand.

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Somewhat determined by past Planning is very spontaneous and undetermined. emotional influences; creativity is limited by cause-effect perceptions. Being here with awareness of future goal; naturally satisfied Seeking, trying to get there, which is 'away from here'; dissatisfied The future doesn't seem distant and planning doesn't set up negative feeling Thinking about distant future sets up dissatisfaction, pressure, or anxiety Somewhat habitual thinking and A sense of complete spontaneity and Creativity behavior tied to past and future; comprehensive creativity; energies not structured pervasive perception of causeinto events and cause and effect relations. effect relations. Work is affected by time's Peak productivity, effortless performance without a Productivity scattering into moment after doer; multiple 'events' are experienced and done moment and past-present-future; simultaneously effort is required by self, which takes positions apart from activity Unlimited: limits are quickly or immediately seen through Limited by adoption of positions based on conditioning Perception of identical, limited- Time is seen as variable, not fixed or limited Estimation capacity time slots extending into whatsoever of temporal past and future duration Past not projected into estimations Based on past, limited productivity Although objective can be distinguished from Sense of reality Objective reality is felt to be separate from subjective reality subjective for practical communication, there's no felt separation Planning To transform the linear sense of time flowing, see How Our Sense of Time Flow is Created.

Evoke a Timeless Experience

Feeling pressured, anxious, hurried, and overwhelmed are part of linear time perspectives, a way of experiencing time flowing relentlessly among past, present, and future. It's this infrastructure, the relentless and uncontrollable flow of time that makes you anxious. But you don't need to experience time this way. During peak experience you're probably so absorbed in what you're doing there's either no awareness of time flowing, or it seems like time is going very quickly but isn't making you anxious with its passing. (See Linear vs. Timeless Views.)

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We all have certain activities or projects or techniques that easily foster such 'time warps' or timelessnesses. Think about what you like to do that normally does away with the feeling of time flowing linearly and relentlessly from moment to moment. What gets you so absorbed you don't notice time passing? Identify three activities that bring about a sense of timelessness, well-being, and relaxation. Now whenever you're feeling pressured, and provided of course that your circumstances allow (e.g., if you're at work, you may not be able to ski), you can do one of those activities to break through the pressure and foster a sense of timelessness. Just do one of the activities you've identified until the pressure lightens. The choice is yours whether you continue to reinforce the pressured linear flow of time or open it up to some less fixed experience.

Clock Watching
This exercise directly balances the throat energy center, where imbalance seems to produce pressure and anxiety about time. The exercise also balances left and right hemispheres. Set up your environment so that you have at least ten minutes when you won't be interrupted or distracted: five minutes for watching the clock and five minutes afterwards for thinking and writing. Find a quiet place and set up a clock to watch, preferably a large clock that is 7-8 feet away from where you will sit. You watch the second hand, and concentrate loosely as you watch the hand move. Breathe easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth. (See Breathing Exercise.) Watch for five minutes or so. Before beginning, it can be helpful to set a timer for five minutes--a timer can relieve you of the need to track clock time. As you continue, see if you can let the breath become more and more even and continuous, without breaks or jerkiness--this is important. As you relax and observe the movement you might explore these questions: Does the SOTP change? If so, how? Does every minute seem equally long? How are pressure and anxiety related to the flow of time? Make some notes about what happens. After doing the exercise you might find it helpful to read the following section of Results in No Time in which a character named Michael does four sessions of the clock watching exercise. This material gives some ideas of the kinds of experiences that can sometimes happen when doing the clock watching exercise.

First Session
Michael put a chair halfway across the room from the large clock in the den. Then he set a timer for five minutes and sat down facing the clock.

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"This is an unusual thing to do. Most of the time when I watch the clock I'm anxious, and I'm doing something else. Well, let's get into it," he thought. "Jed said to breathe through the mouth and nose, very evenly. I heard that this same type of breathing was used in Kum Nye practices, and in some martial arts like Tai Chi." Michael noticed some tension in his shoulders and relaxed it. Then he became aware of breathing through nose and mouth, which was a new method for him. "The breathing feels a little unusual, but maybe I'll get used to it. . . ." "Nothing interesting so far." he thought. He just saw a second hand going around the way it always did. Then he recalled the instructions. "I'm supposed to let the breathing slow down a little, with each breath lasting longer than before. . . . Breathing is a little more subtle in a way. . . . There's still a kind of jumping back and forth between noticing the second hand and attending to my breath. Maybe I can relax a little more. . . ." "Whoops. The hand seemed to jump five seconds there. I guess I lost track of it for some reason. . . . Ugh, did I really think that? That reminds me of my discussion with Jed about 'losing track' of time--we feel we need to 'accurately track' some imagined external movement of time. [See "What We teach About Time."] I guess I'm still stuck in that perspective to some extent." "Well, the usual experience of tracking time is back [See Linear Time], with myself sitting near the typical conveyor belt of time moving from past to present to future. . . . But I'm not paying much attention to the breathing now, so I'll put a little more attention on the breath and relax some more. . . . And gently focus on the movement of the hand. . . ." "Whoop, there I lost it again. In fact I lost the whole clock. . . . That was interesting--kind of like falling asleep. . . . Except that I've been sitting here upright, and I know that I didn't sleep. . . . At least not the way sleep usually feels. But my awareness was different somehow. . . . Whatever happened, I'm back to tracking time the 'normal' way." The timer went off. Michael reached toward the desk for his notebook, then wrote some notes about his experience: "That five minutes went 'pretty fast'. Except of course for a couple of breaks in the middle where time didn't seem to 'go' at all. There was some insight about the belief that our SOTP is supposed to track some kind of external time-flow. I found it was important to just keep relaxing and balance awareness over both watching and breathing."

Second Session
After watching the clock for a couple of minutes, Michael's breathing became very even and regular, almost palpable. He wasn't trying to breath any certain way any more, and was hardly even aware of breathing as something separate from the clock watching. . . . He seemed able to just watch the second hand as a motion and not associate it with 'time'. The hand was just a thing moving timelessly in space.

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Then a 'normal' feeling of time returned. "Wow. My breathing is a little rougher, not so even. Maybe my breathing is closely related to the way I experience time." The timer went off. Michael reached for his notebook and wrote: "Breathing became very even, and almost palpable. Kind of nourishing somehow. 'Lost track' of breathing as a separate activity. Second hand was no longer a 'thing' and neither was the 'clock'. There was just a motion, with no SOTP (sense of time passing). Interesting! Maybe that's why Jed calls this exercise 'looking into the eye of time'. It can be like the eye of a hurricane, where there's a combination of movement and a feeling of no movement. Then 'normal time' showed up. Quality of breathing seemed related to experience of time. Perhaps my sense of myself as a separate observer disappears when my SOTP disappears. And when time returns, the observer returns, separate from a clock being watched." As a result of his finding that breathing was closely related to his SOTP, Michael tried to do the breathing through mouth and nose all day long--except when he was jogging, eating, talking, or sneezing.

Third Session
"Lots of thoughts today. Hard to relax and slow down the breath. . . ." "I wonder how much time is left. . . . The hands of the clock are very meaningful to me now. Nothing interesting so far. . . . This reminds me of the treadmill that Adams was talking about. Boring and repetitious. . . . I feel very separate from the clock, and it definitely looks like a 'thing'. . . ." "Maybe if I focus more on the breathing. . . . And relax that tension behind my eyes. . . . Now the breath is slowing. . . . Balance attention on hand. . . ." The timer went off. "Wow. Those were some of the longest minutes I've spent doing this." He reached for the notebook and wrote: "Hard to relax, lots of thoughts. Very aware of regular SOTP, with myself separate from a thing called a clock. Focused more on breath. Seems like the tension behind my eyes was related to habitually looking outward for something."

Fourth Session
Over a couple of minutes Michael's breath became very even and regular, almost shallow, as though he was hardly breathing. There was a deep sense of relaxation, no anxiety at all. . . . Then he came out of the concentration and commented: "It's a little easier to get relaxed each session. . . . Perhaps there's some kind of stability or balance in my breathing as a result of practicing every day." "Now to gently balance attention between breathing and movement of the hand. . . . " "There was a timelessness--for who knows how long? Then there was a tendency for the hand to emerge along with an observer. But noticing that tendency made it possible to relax and let the structure of selfother-time dissolve. . . ."

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The timer went off. "Too bad that that period's over!" Michael reached for the notebook and wrote: "I feel energized. Breath was very even, almost shallow. Came out of it and commented, then balanced awareness over breath and movement. A timelessness. Noticing how self and clock tended to emerge at poles of 'clock watching activity' made it possible to dissolve the subject-object perspective and stay in an open space."

Exaggerate the Pressure Perspective

Under a deadline we feel pressured and anxious when we think about a future deadline when a project is due. This pressure and anxiety occur because over years we have developed a habitual way of looking at the future, a way that can be called the 'pressure perspective': we occupy a point in time we call 'the present', and we look from this point to a somewhat distant segment of time called 'the future', which contains the deadline that is relentlessly closing in on us here in the present with a speed that seems unchangeable. (There are innumerable other perspectives: check out Linear vs. Timeless Views, or read about the experience of time during peak experiences in "The Qualities of Deadline Pressure Scenarios.") You can loosen up this habitual 'pressure perspective' by consciously adopting the perspective again and again. This will bring awareness to a somewhat unconscious habit and tend to break up the habit. From your present position in time look forward to a deadline on some project you have. What do you see then? Now look farther ahead into the future until you identify another event (not necessarily a deadline). What do you see then? Once again look farther ahead into the future for another event. What do you see? Continue for a few minutes.

???
What do you notice? Is there any outcome of this process? How do you feel? Is there any sense of relaxation, contentment, or presence that wasn't there before? Or did the exercise just heighten the anxiety and pressure you were already feeling? (If it did, try the Balance Your Breathing exercise.)

Gambling with Deadline Pressure

This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Results in No Time. You could do the Card Sorting Exercise before or after reading this excerpt. "You want to try a little experiment?" "What is it, Jed?" asked Michael. "It's a great mini-lab to explore deadline pressures. A simple card sorting exercise." Jed attracted the waiter's attention, then asked him, "Could we borrow a deck of cards from the casino?"

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"What do we do with the cards?" Michael asked. "You sort the cards into books. Groups of deuces, threes, fours, and so on. Try to do it in less than 60 seconds. Sixty seconds is the deadline. I'll time you, Ok?" The waiter returned with a deck. "I'm game," Michael replied. Jed shuffled the cards a couple of times and handed them to Michael. "Ok. Ready, set, go!" Michael started steadily and deliberately, putting several cards on the table before coming to a second jack. Then he gradually picked up the pace, still moving quite smoothly. "Fifteen seconds!" Jed announced. "What? Already?" Michael said as his eyes bugged a bit. He felt anxious, as if time was running faster than before. His eyes darted quickly back and forth, comparing the stacks to the cards in his hand. "Thirty seconds!" "Unbelievable!" Michael was feeling pressured, and wasn't sure whether he'd be able to finish in a minute. He moved jerkily as he estimated whether he had finished half the cards in 30 seconds. He concluded that he hadn't finished half. "Forty-five seconds!" Michael didn't think he'd make it, so he tried to hurry a bit more. Then his sorting hand fumbled when he tried to pick up the next card from the deck. That broke his rhythm, and he seemed to be a little confused. He thought he'd have to race to beat the clock now. "Sixty seconds!" "Bummer." Michael groaned, but kept sorting. As he sorted the last few cards, he slowed down as if coasting toward a finish line. "About seventy seconds," said Jed. "That was awful." "Really stressful, eh? It looked like you were racing against time."

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"I was." Jed picked up the cards and shuffled them. "How did that happen?" "I guess I panicked when you said fifteen seconds. I was doing fine till then, no problem with time. But you startled me, and I was struggling against the flow of time from then on." "But you seemed to be doing all right till later." "Yeah. After thirty seconds, I figured out that at that rate I wouldn't finish in time, so I tried to hurry up. And that just made things worse." "With that kind of race-against-time perspective you might be able to force yourself and get a good time or two. But if you had to work like that all day long, I think it would eventually affect your health and well-being." "Yeah," said Michael. "By the end of one day I'd be wiped out." "I guess that shows how racing against time doesn't work very well. You can't win, because racing has side-effects." "I know some of the side-effects firsthand--anxiety, pressure, and lots of tension." Michael leaned back against the seat and relaxed. "You know, Jed, I totally forgot about doing the breathing [See Balance Your Breathing] during the sorting. I wonder if it would have helped if I had done it. It worked great to deal with anxiety when I was doing the clock watching exercise."

Containing What's Possible

"Doing the breathing seems to help keep the race with time from ever starting. So I suspect it would have helped. But there's something else that might have helped, too." "What's that?" Michael asked.

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"It's another part of the conveyor belt metaphor that we talked about before [See Linear Time]. We said time is like a horizontal conveyor belt that moves from past to present to future at the same unchangeable speed for all of us." "Right." "But here's something else: On the conveyor there is an endless series of containers. And in this metaphor, the way we 'spend our time' is by putting our activities into the containers. So as the conveyor moves by us, we stand there and put our activities into the containers."

<--- past

present

future --->

"Ok." "These containers are all the same size, which means that each has the same 'capacity' as every other. Every container holds the promise of equal but limited possibility. Let's say for the sake of example that each container holds thirty seconds' worth of activities." "Ok. So once I fill a container with thirty seconds' worth of activities, that's it for that one. To do any more I need another container?" "Right," said Jed. "This built-in limit is reflected by the fact that every box on a month's calendar is usually the same size." "And minute and hour markers on watches and clocks are equally spaced," Michael added. "So what this means, if we 'buy into', or believe this image--and our culture generally does buy into it--is that what we can accomplish in any time period is limited by the structure of time itself." "Sometimes I say, 'I didn't have enough time'. Is that the kind of thing you mean?"

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"Yes. If you believe in the limited capacity of time-containers, and if you're talking to someone else who believes in their limited capacity, then the other person might accept your statement as being 'true' or 'realistic'." "But as you pointed out earlier, our limiting feelings and ideas about time are not 'true'." "Right. They may be 'true' of linear time's limited-volume container images--if we believe them--but they are not 'true' of other perspectives--timelessness, for example--where there are no limited containers and no conveyor. (See Linear vs. Timeless Views.) In fact, we in the research group don't think there is any built-in limit to what can be accomplished in a given interval of clock time." [Tarthang Tulku writes, "There is no particular temporal point that is too small to divide when using a more advanced 'knowingness'." From Ralph H. Moon and Stephen Randall, eds. Dimensions of Thought: Current Explorations in Time, Space, and Knowledge, Vol. I (Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1980), p. 47.] "No limit at all?" "Right. We just keep opening the envelope of possibilities as we approach the circle's central timelessness. But let's return to your race against time. Does this conveyor-container image fit your race experience?" "All too well. In terms of this image, when thirty seconds was up, I had used up one container. I knew I had only one more thirty-second container left, and I didn't know whether the rest of the sorting would fit into just one more." "Did you try to make some kind of estimate?" "Yes. I took a quick glance to see whether half the cards were already on the table. But it looked like I still had more than half in my hand." "So you concluded that you wouldn't get done in time?" "Yes. I was sure that if I continued at that rate I wouldn't get done in sixty seconds. So I tried to hurry, and then things got worse." "Right. Hurrying usually just scatters our energy and adds to the intensity of linear time, which is probably the least beneficial view of time." "But I don't think I would have had a chance to finish in time if I hadn't hurried." "That may be true, but at best, hurrying only helps get results in the short term." ". . . while adding stress, as I confirmed." "Right. You might get better short-term results along with diminished well-being. But for the long term, it seems best to 'see through' the linear view, to not buy into its convincing structure. When enough of the linear view's momentum has been 'seen through', a serial view of time begins to appear. The serial view allows much greater productivity. And eventually, when the persuasiveness of this view loses its hold, an even more complete timelessness appears, opening the envelope of productivity even wider." 66

Adding Breathing Exercise to Card Sorting

Jed offered the cards to Michael: "You want to go for sixty seconds again?" "Sure. But this time I'm going to use the breathing technique." "And if you do get a little anxious and the conveyor scenario tries to convince you of the limited capacity of its containers, you don't need to believe the message. You can move a bit of attention to smooth breathing, and go ahead." Michael took the cards, saying "Give me a minute to warm up for the next heat." He relaxed and began to breathe smoothly through both nose and mouth with the tip of his tongue on the upper palate. During the next minute his breathing gradually slowed down. "Ok. Ready, set, go!" Michael started quickly and smoothly, putting cards on the table keeping a bit of attention on the breathing. It felt a little unusual to move so quickly yet feel a kind of stillness of the breath. "Fifteen seconds!" Jed announced. This time Michael wasn't thrown off by Jed's announcement. He just went on sorting and breathing. In fact he kind of fell into a 'groove' or 'flow' where there was no noticeable effort. "Thirty seconds!" Michael felt a bit of anxiety about whether he was 'on track' to finish in sixty seconds. He noticed the linear conveyor just starting to take form around him with a deadline beginning to appear from the future, thirty seconds 'up ahead'. But he didn't buy into the persuasiveness of the form. There was no 'point' to it. He just breathed and went on sorting. "Forty-five seconds!" There was a bit of thinking about whether he'd make it, but the thinking didn't break the smooth rhythm. "There, done!" Michael announced. Jed quickly glanced at his watch. "Great! Fifty-five seconds!"

Not Buying Time

"That felt pretty good! I have more energy now than when I started. I might be able to do it all day long this way." "Yes. You don't seem the least bit stressed." "So the breathing exercise does seem like a great way to keep from getting anxious when you have to get something done quickly."

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"It prevents the pressure and anxiety related to an imbalance in the head and throat centers [See How Our Sense of Time is Created] that we talked about with procrastination." Jed picked up the cards. "I didn't notice any effort to 'beat the clock' this time. Did you notice any times when you tended to get a linear view?" [See Linear Time.] "There were only a couple of 'spots' were the conveyor belt started to take form and cause some anxiety. But they weren't very convincing. And it never even got close to a 'point'--as it did the first time I sorted-where I was really involved in the linear view and estimating whether I'd win a race against time." "The breathing may have helped there too. The continuity of breathing seems related to the continuity of awareness. So there's less tendency for the conveyor--with its splitting of a future apart from a present-to take form." "Jed, we talked earlier about how SOTP measures how much you're resisting what you're doing. I have been aware for years of how I resist doing things. But the resistance I used to notice was always in blocks of hours or minutes. I'm not used to thinking of resistance in terms of seconds as I did during the card sorting. This is a new idea for me." "I remember that the same kind of thing happened when you did the clock watching exercise. You became able to be aware of smaller and smaller intervals of time." Jed continued, "Did you notice what was happening with your sense of identity while you did the sorting?" "Before the thirty-second mark, the sorting flowed, or got into a groove. It was like I disappeared, and there was just this really open and dynamic movement. It went by itself, with no friction or effort."

Card Sorting Exercise

Try this mock-work mini-lab to explore different ways of working under deadline pressure. The mockwork is simple card sorting using an ordinary deck of 52 playing cards. The 'work' is simple so that you can pay attention to, and learn about how you do the task rather than what you're doing.

First Heat
You sort the cards (and it's not important exactly how many cards you have, just use the same number for each time trial) into books--groups of four deuces (two of hearts, two of clubs, two of spades, and two of diamonds), four threes, four fours, and so on. Try to sort the whole deck in less than 60 seconds. In other words, sixty seconds is the deadline. Use a stopwatch or the second hand of a clock or watch to see how many seconds it takes you. Get ready, get set, go!

--- --- --68

After you finish, make some notes about your experience and any insights you have. Did you ever notice a time when it felt like the deadline was closing in on you? Could you work all day long like that? Would there be a tendency to burn out? If so, why? Were there any timeless or really enjoyable spots?

Second Heat
Now shuffle the cards, and do the sorting again. See whether you can beat your time--by getting into it more, not by racing or hurrying against time. Relax, but get totally involved, holding nothing back. Before starting, 'warm up' by breathing easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth. (See Balance Your Breathing for more information.) Continue this kind of smooth breathing as you sort the cards. Once again, time yourself. Get ready, get set, go!

--- --- --After you finish, make some notes about your experience and any insights you have. Did you ever notice a time when it felt like the deadline was closing in on you? Could you work all day long like that? Would there be a tendency to burn out? If so, why? Were there any timeless or really enjoyable spots? Did the breathing continue smoothly throughout the exercise? How much clock time did it take compared to the first time you did the sorting? What slowed you down? Can you see how the time pressure you felt was related to your increasing or decreasing, moment-by-moment involvement in the sorting? (You could read about different levels of involvement in "Where Does Time Pressure Come From?") What could you do to increase your involvement in the sorting?

Third Heat
Now do a third trial. Challenge yourself to decrease the clock time needed while improving your relaxation, energy level, and sense of well-being. See whether you can beat your time--by getting into it more, not by racing or hurrying against time. Also, see whether you notice how your varying involvement in the sorting is related to the varying time pressure you feel. Once again, before starting, 'warm up' by breathing easily, gently, and smoothly through both nose and mouth, with the tip of your tongue on the upper palate just in back of your front teeth. (See Balance Your Breathing for more information.) Continue this kind of smooth breathing as you sort the cards. Once again, time yourself. Get ready, get set, go!

--- --- --69

After you finish, make some notes about your experience and any insights you have. Did you ever notice a time when it felt like the deadline was closing in on you? Could you work all day long like that? Would there be a tendency to burn out? If so, why? Were there any timeless or really enjoyable spots? Did the breathing continue smoothly throughout the exercise? How much clock time did it take compared to the first and second times you did the sorting? What slowed you down? Can you see how the time pressure you felt was related to your increasing or decreasing, moment-by-moment involvement in the sorting? (You could read about different levels of involvement in "Where Does Time Pressure Come From?") What could you do to increase your involvement in the sorting? Now you can read about experiences of others' doing this exercise in this excerpt from Results in No Time: "Gambling with Deadline Pressure."

Different Perspectives of Planning

What's the typical way we plan things, or estimate how long it will take to do something? In the Western linear view of time, minute and hour lines on watches are equally spaced. Every box on the month's calendar is the same size; each day usually has the same size box; every hour on the to-do list has the same size space next to it, symbolizing that each hour is seen to be equally valuable, having equal though limited possibility. So the work we can accomplish in each hour seems to be limited by the structure of time itself. To estimate how much time we'll need to finish something, we guess how many of the conveyor's containers the activity will fill up. The inflexible, aspect of this estimation process is related to the perceived fixed and 'real' capacity of units of linear time.

Let's say I've got two days to get something done. I work on it for a day, and I realize I've got one day left. Half the time's gone. How much have I done? I look back and realize that I've done one-third of the job. Using the typical way of estimating, my conclusion is that if I continue working at the same rate, I'll get two-thirds of it done by the deadline. So what are my options within that view? Maybe I need to speed up somehow. Or do a sloppy job. Or bargain to push the deadline ahead. Or get some help.

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It really limits our options to be locked into the linear view. We have assumed that clock time predictions within the linear view are reasonable and predictive of the future, and that they present the only possibilities. We have ignored the fact that we are most productive within a timeless view (See Linear vs. Timeless Views, and the discussion of our "Experience of time" in both 'deadline scenarios' and peak performance in "The Qualities of Deadline Pressure Scenarios"), which still includes clock time's measurements, yet makes quantum jumps in productivity possible. But contrary to this linear view, we all know times when we had to get something done and thought it was impossible. We let go of our reasonable time estimates and judgments that we couldn't get it done and went for it, putting all our attention on the task and working without worrying about how many containers we seemed to have left! The idea that work is overwhelming or impossible belongs only to the linear view. By letting go of the linear view of time with its built-in limits on productivity we can get more done than seems reasonable or predictable.

There's an alternative to a linear way of viewing future goals.

It's not suggested that you stop thinking about or visualizing the future, nor to give up your goal orientation. Images and concepts of time (such as estimates of clock time) are not incompatible with fulfillment and well-being. We can simply loosen up any kind of rigid attention on a separate future, any kind of tight positioning with regard to a goal that seems to be off in the distance. In the typical 'pressure perspective' we occupy a point in time we call 'the present', and we look from this point to a somewhat distant segment of time called 'the future', which contains the deadline that is relentlessly closing in on us here in the present with a speed that seems unchangeable. In other words, "First we pick out a point situated 'up ahead' in time, then we measure the distance to that point, then we react to this situated point." (p. 93, Dynamics of Time and Space) There are other possible ways to relate to the future. Here is an excerpt from Results in No Time that discusses this issue: "Tony, I'm still not clear on my question about how I can think about goals without getting involved in linear time." "You can see a goal without seeking, without pursuing a goal in linear time." "I don't get it." "The thing is, thinking about goals is not a problem--but thinking about goals in linear time can be a problem." "So what's most important is how we're goal-oriented, and not whether we have goals?" asked Michael. "Yes. Let's clarify how we usually visualize goals. We are on what might be thought of as a conveyor belt of time. The conveyor passes through three rooms: past, present, and future. We're always in the present room--we take that for granted. We can't go into the future room. There's some kind of unknown divider between the present and future rooms, and the divider has a hazy window in it. Even though we can't go into the future room, we can look into it through the window."

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"I'm familiar with this." "We seek our goals in the future room. Seeking is a built-in part of the linear view. This planning is similar to peering through the hazy window to see how the fuzzy future forms might shape up. We then get an idea of what's 'coming down the pike' toward us on the conveyor." "That sounds familiar, too." "The whole picture I've painted of this linear time perspective is troublesome if we're convinced of its reality," said Tony. "But none of this is 'real'. We don't need to pursue goals within linear time. We can work with goals in a timeless way." "How?" asked Michael. "Well, first let me paint a picture of how it could be; then we can do an exercise that's very useful in allowing the ideal picture to show up." "Ok." Michael leaned back in his chair. "It could be that there is only one space, not three spaces--past, present, and future--divided by unknown walls. This one space might be completely undivided, with all of time--past, present, and future--right 'here'. Since nothing is outside this space, everything you could want is here. Since the space is undivided, nothing is separate from you. Nothing in the space is cut off from anything else. Present is not cut off from future; past is not cut off from present. It doesn't feel like time is flowing any more, because all of time is right here. Past memories are here and the open possibilities of the future are here." Tony continued: "Now suppose you want something, or you have a goal. The goal is seen as a kind of shimmering hologram close at hand. It doesn't feel like you are deficient or you lack something and need to seek somewhere or somewhen else to get it, because everything is right here in the same space. You aren't seduced by imagining that getting something outside will bring greater satisfaction, because there isn't any 'outside'. So you can make progress toward your goal with equanimity, without being motivated by aversion or hope. On the circle of life, this virtue for dimension #3 is called nondirected goal awareness." "So you change the way you relate to a goal," said Michael. "There is still an image of the goal you would like to realize, but the goal doesn't feel temporally separate from you, off in a future room. There is a goal, but no pursuing a goal." "Yes. So then the question is 'How do we 'get from' the linear view to the completely open space? One way is to turn the linear perspective around. We take the characteristic orientation of planning, where we look from the present room toward the future, and reverse it--we look from the future room back towards the present and past. The idea is that by reversing the habitual view of time, we can loosen the energy that's fixed in it and gradually dissolve the seeking tendency. Eventually I think one could completely dissolve all the limitations of the linear view." "I'm afraid our lunch time is over though."

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Tony opened a drawer. "Well, here. You can take this writeup with you. It gives a pretty good explanation of how to do the exercise. And you can call me if you have any questions." "Ok. I'll give it a try. Thanks, Tony." "You're quite welcome. And thank you, Michael. Give me a call if you have any questions about the exercise." (p. 105-9, Results in No Time)

Question-Response Process
This exercise can be very useful for determining goals and priorities, working through confusion and emotions to make decisions, and dealing with emotional issues and physical symptoms. As our experience spontaneously arises to awareness, we have a choice about how we deal with it: we can (1) avoid or cling to it, either of which is an attachment to it, or (2) accept it, let it be, and experience it. If we accept our experience and just let it be, it eventually disappears, and we have peace and relaxation, and eventually find that we are aware of something else. However, if we avoid or cling to something, we are giving attention or energy to it, and it becomes more important, significant, persistent, and real to us. (We may push it out of our awareness for awhile, but eventually it will come back, and when it does, it will have even more energy with it.) It seems that we make many--or even all--of our problems and symptoms by this process of attachment to (avoiding or clinging to) our experience. So the key to change is, paradoxically enough, to fully accept what is happening. Once we do that, the experience will eventually disappear on its own. (This is not to imply that we don't make decisions or act as appropriate.)

The Process
The process consists of a sequence of questions and responses: question, response, question, response, etc. Just as when we write the sequence "question, response, question, response" we leave a space between neighboring words, so also there is a kind of space between the questions and responses in our process. The space used in this process involves pure awareness--not awareness of something, just awareness. It's like a space between thoughts, or between contents of consciousness (contents are either thoughts, images, emotions, feelings, perceptions, or sensations). It's a resting place where we are not aware of thoughts or feelings--we are just being. It's a kind of clear state of mind that we may have when first arising in the morning (before getting our 'act' together), after strenuous exercise, or when just relaxing quietly without focusing on anything. You start by asking a question about whatever you want to know or clarify (such as "What is my headache about?"). Then relax and let go of the question by going into the 'space' of pure awareness. In this space you simply relax until some kind of response to your question rises to awareness. Take as your response the first content (thought, emotion, image, feeling, perception, or sensation) that comes.

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(Thus responses are not just thoughts, although you might get more thoughts than other types of contents, especially when first doing this process.) Trust the process and accept whatever comes as the response. In fact--feelings of doubt, confusion, distrust, and uncertainty are common responses for questions. Even nothing, or a sense of blankness may be a response. A sensation in your left big toe may be a response. Take whatever comes first, and experience it fully. If an emotion is the response, go 'into' it and feel it until it disappears. If an image arises, stay with it till it changes or loses its energy. After the response has disappeared, there will once again be the space of pure awareness. Allow another question to come to awareness. This question will most often, but not always, be obviously related to the previous response. For example, the question might ask what the doubt or confusion in the previous response means, or what the sadness in the previous response is about. This question is then dealt with just as the previous question was, and the process is continued, with question, response, question, response, etc., until you have clarified your original issue or your symptom has disappeared. If you're still wondering whether to end the process, you can ask that question also.

Pitfalls
One pitfall is to lose concentration and get lost in thinking or analyzing while doing the process. If you find yourself losing your concentration, the process will not be so effective. Another pitfall is not staying long enough with your response to a question. This may happen with a response involving an emotionally charged memory. It may also happen whenever there's doubt, confusion, pain, or a blank kind of feeling. It's difficult to go too far 'wrong' here though--if you move on to the next question too quickly, often the same situation or feeling from the previous response will appear as the new response. Finally, not trusting what comes up as a response is probably the most common pitfall. There is a strong tendency to distrust responses that are not what you wanted to get. Also, the responses may not make sense to you; they may seem "wrong"; however, if they are experienced and followed--and not just evaluated for truth or accuracy--a pattern, order, or resolution may be seen later on. Tape-recording or writing your process down can sometimes help make sense of the sequence of questions and responses after you stop.

Thoughts in Conflict
This exercise can be very use in resolving conflicts of all sorts. Bring a positive or negative thought or judgment into the mind and while maintaining it look for its accompanying opposite. Let the two opposed thoughts do battle with each other, while you observe the conflict. At first the two thoughts will likely alternate, but later they can both be present at once, carrying equal significance. You can maintain this balance through a focus on the feeling of disagreement, conflict, etc. (p. 49, Exercise Six, Love of Knowledge)

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How Do You Measure Progress?

There are many different ways to measure your progress as you sharpen your time management skills and improve productivity. A very simple way is to really think about how you're doing when (or shortly after) people ask, "How's it going?" Different ways seem to be appropriate at different times and at different stages of human development. I'll present some methods that I've found so far. As the Douglasses say, "Whatever methods you use to evaluate your progress, the important thing is to evaluate it regularly." (Manage Your Time, Manage Your Work, Manage Yourself, p. 269)

Two Wings on a Bird--Two Questions

Birds need two wings to fly--they can't fly with one wing. One is not more important than the other; they're simply both necessary. Similarly, it seems that to measure progress in life, we need to periodically consider two questions. One question is, "Am I doing the right thing?" A second one is, "Am I doing things right?" Another way of stating the first question was provided by time management guru Alan Lakein: "What is the best use of my time right now?" (How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, by Alan Lakein. Signet, New York, 1973, p. 96) Most of us have numerous tasks and objectives that we wish to accomplish. Among all these things, what is best to do right now? Occasionally asking this question is very important. This conventional time management (CTM) question helps us clarify what to do. Perhaps we haven't really thought much about what we're doing, and it would be better to do something else now. It seems that we think about this question implicitly anyway--why not make it explicit? Of course we will have some uncertainty and confusion unless we have determined our goals, prioritized the tasks necessary to reach our goals, and set up a schedule (see conventional time management workshop). Another way of stating the second question is, "Am I timelessly involved in what I'm doing?" (See Excerpts from Results in No Time and Linear vs. Timeless Views.) This inner time management (ITM) question helps us clarify how to do things. It asks whether we are doing things in the optimal, timeless way. People report that in peak experiences of all kinds, there is no sense of time flowing in a way that feels out of control. So it's helpful to ask "Randall's question" periodically: "Am I timelessly involved in what I'm doing?" If not, if we're not totally involved, or if we feel time passing in a way that has even a slight bit of pressure or anxiety, there's room for improvement in both productivity and well-being. The time management guide addresses various tasks, habits, and time-wasting perceptions and feelings like anxiety, deadline pressure, and the simple feeling of time passing. If you can identify what is between you and a timeless way of being and doing, check the guide--the obstacle might be there. Click on the appropriate link(s) and you should find some exercises to do to move toward the center of the whirlwind of your activity. Most conventional time management seminars cannot resolve our problems with time because they don't touch the limits built into the linear time paradigm (LT) that usually underlies CTM. (See Two Paradigms: Performance & Well-Being Depend on the Paradigm of Time.) "While with these [CTM] methods you may alleviate some time pressures temporarily, because your state of being is not affected, you never generate any deep or lasting changes in how you view and interact with time. . . . Ultimately 75

you return to your old ways, and with new frustration." (Hunt and Hait) Lasting, substantial control and use of time, to increase health, productivity, and creativity, is possible only if we understand time, our attitudes toward it, and how it works--and this is not usually taught in CTM seminars. Rather than CTM's focus on what we want to do, inner time management (ITM) gives methods to optimize the moment-by-moment way we relate to, or the extent to which we are involved in, our current activity. By finding the peaceful, yet most productive 'zone' at the center of our whirlwind of activities, we can transform our feelings of time flowing--including overwhelm, time pressure, anxiety, and boredom. For people in all but the most routine jobs, learning and consistently using both CTM and ITM methods is both valuable and necessary in order to continually improve our lives both personally and professionally. By combining ITM practices with CTM, we can not only avoid the mindless drivenness that readily accompanies CTM with its usual focus on results, but also open up new levels of performance and fulfillment that are simply unavailable with CTM alone. For an introduction to some of the principles of ITM, see Mastering Time 101.

Other Measures
Another measure of progress is provided by the Mastering Time Inventory. This checks attitudes, principles, and practices essential to mastering time. For some people it is extremely helpful to use a journal occasionally thoughout the day, or just at the beginning or end of the day, in order to record what's happening with regard to increasing productivity and well-being. Often people find that bringing a bit more attention to what's happening by writing things down--whatever comes to mind--allows helpful insight to form, bringing clarity to whatever can improve your situation. "Making regular journal entries is a way to record your discoveries and see your progress in the adventure of training the mind and bringing awareness to work." (p. xviii, Mastering Successful Work (MSW), by Tarthang Tulku)

Measuring Awareness, Concentration, Energy

"Awareness, concentration, and energy . . . . The more we use them, the more effective they become. . . . there is no limit to how much we can achieve." (p. 53, MSW) "One way to support disciplined work and a specific discipline in itself--is to practice using awareness, concentration, and energy as a yardstick to measure our work and assess whether we are heading toward success or failure. The standards and measurements we apply in our work apply equally well in our personal life, and can also be used to assess the success or failure of organizations, educational systems, and even national and international policy-making." (p. 120) "We could think of awareness as the driver, concentration as the vehicle, and energy as the fuel that gets us where we want to go. Using these three resources together, we can define our work clearly, direct attention as needed, set targets, and move steadily to meet our goals, shaping our intention and intelligence toward a diamond-like intensity.

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"As we gain familiarity with the interplay of aware-ness, concentration, and energy, we will find that different combinations are suitable for different types of work. By observing and experimenting to see which are the best combinations for particular tasks, we can begin to learn more about their interconnections and make subtle adjustments that make us more effective. For example, while some kinds of work require a narrow focus, others need a broad perspective, and some call for a combination of both. Writing in a quiet environment, we can focus purely on the ideas and words before us; doing welding several stories up, we need to develop a broader kind of concentration. "Again, some jobs require soft energy and some need intense energy. To control powerful machinery like a jackhammer, energy must be both stable and powerful. Mental work or graphic design also calls for stable energy, but with a softer intensity. Similarly, when we make an initial plan for a project, a good sketch may be all that is needed to start the creative process. When it is time to refine the plan, however, we need a very precise and cutting awareness that carefully delineates each detail in sequence." (pp. 49-50) "At times the interplay among these three resources can become unbalanced in quite specific ways. If awareness does not choose a goal toward which energy can be directed, energy becomes inconsistent, chaotic, and confused, and eventually turns toward dullness. Energy without concentration is scattered and restless: Instead of being productive, it feeds on dissatisfaction and tends toward extremes of emotionality and ultimately collapse. Without energy, awareness and concentration are quickly depleted; if they do continue to operate, we fall into daydreams or pleasant but essentially meaningless images." (p. 123) "It is possible to identify imbalances in the interplay of awareness, concentration, and energy in individuals, in a single project at work, and in the rise and fall of corporations; perhaps we can even see such imbalances at work in the fortunes of whole nations and civilizations. The more we look in these ways, the more we realize that the interplay of these three resources helps shape our human destinies." (p. 124)

"Exercise 36: Observing ACE

A good beginning practice for tracing awareness, concentration and energy in operation is to take notes every day on how these factors show up in your experience. Note the effect of the weather, your working conditions, the specific demands of the job you are currently doing, your physical and mental condition, your diet, your emotions, what you sense and experience, your situation at home, and so on. Observe those around you as well, looking for patterns. For example, young people readily manifest energy, those in their middle years are more likely to be focused and concentrated, and those who are older are more able to awaken awareness. Another factor to evaluate is hoxv the kind of work being done affects and draws on awareness, concentration, and energy. In some kinds of work the failure to develop certain kinds of concentration can actually be dangerous; in others a different quality of concentration, more akin to awareness, must operate if there are to be any worthwhile results. Artists and musicians need an awareness linked to sensitivity, while a successful stockbroker needs the kind of awareness that focuses on details and broadscale trends alike, successfully balancing both. It might also be possible to discover different patterns within different ethnic or cultural groups." (p. 126)

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"Exercise 37: Chart of Self-Discovery

This practice makes use of awareness, concentration, and energy as a yardstick to assess how you are working and how you could improve your discipline. The basic exercise is to chart the rise and fall of each factor throughout the day." Make a simple chart to record your measurements. Put 'awareness', 'concentration', 'energy', 'productivity', and 'satisfaction' on the vertical axis. Use copies of the chart "to track awareness, concentration, and energy for a month, assigning each factor a value between one (the lowest) and ten (the highest). By tracking yourself regularly you will begin to see more clearly how variations are connected both to the nature of the work and to the level of accomplishment and satisfaction. Making entries three times a day is recommended: in the early morning, at midday, and at the end of the afternoon. If you wish, you could add a fourth checkpoint in the late evening. At each checkpoint, be alert for negative judgments or feelings of guilt that discourage further efforts. Cultivate a light and pleasurable involvement that supports interest in the measurement process. In this way you will protect your focus on the work, encouraging awareness to fully engage the flow of concentration.

In addition to charting each factor separately, note their interplay. A rule of thumb for spotting imbalances is that the factor operating at the lowest level needs to be functioning at least half as effectively as the highest factor. For example, if concentration is at 8, energy and awareness must be at 4 or higher; otherwise, distortions will arise, and the factor operating at higher levels will begin to deteriorate. In this interplay, concentration should be considered the central factor. Thus, if you average the three factors, the average should be weighted toward concentration. Try a ratio of 2:1:1 to start with, and see

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whether this conforms to your experience. Here is another rule of thumb: a weighted average between 5 and 7 should produce good results. . . . In assigning numerical values to the quality of awareness, concentration, and energy in operation, you will have to develop your own standards for measurement, for at present we lack the shared experience that would allow us to develop a more objective approach. In any case, it is your own experience and your own patterns that count. By conducting this kind of detailed inquiry, you will develop data and knowledge concerning your own capabilities and patterns, learn how to develop your own resources more fully, and prepare yourself to take on bigger challenges and opportunities." (pp. 127-9)

Handling Overwhelm
When we accept the particular truth of this unfolding momentum [of linear time], we subject ourselves to an order beyond our control. Indeed, it has been held that even a divine creator would be subject to the temporal order, unable to change the past or hasten the coming of the future. But attention to rhythm reveals that the momentum of time is nothing fixed. Perhaps the past is not dead and the future is already available. Perhaps the present is alive in a way we ordinarily cannot fathom. The intensification of time's momentum based on the 'mechanisms' of 'friction' and acceleration can overwhelm with its power. But when we seek out greater knowledge, we discover that time is not confined to the onsushing momentum of its linear unfolding. (pp. 97-8, Knowledge of Time and Space, by Tarthang Tulku)

Handling Procrastination
To handle procrastination, first make sure you've broken the project into pieces that are manageable. If you don't have bite-sized tasks, you'll probably be confused and perhaps overwhelmed. You can do mind-mapping or some other method to break down the project. Then, if you want to do something to change the pressure, choose one of these exercises:

Identify Distracting Emotions helps identify negative feelings making it difficult to finish a task Relieve Your Tension is a physical isometric useful to relieve stress and pressure Transforming Energy releases energy stuck by holding back from doing something Turn Time Around releases holding back by turning our 'normal' temporal perspective around

If you'd like to read something, try "Turning Procrastination Around," which explores the procrastination process in depth and presents an exercise that turns the 'procrastination perspective' around. Procrastination begins with some kind of negative feeling that distracts us. However, 'negative' is often just a label put on top of neutral energy. If the 'negative' label can be seen through, there's no impetus to

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avoid things. A physical exercise can provide a mini-lab to experiment with this: Exploring Different Levels of Feeling. Procrastination is an example of how we create our sense of time flow; for more general information on this creation, see How Our Sense of Time Flow is Created.

Identify Distracting Emotions

As discussed in the article "Turning Procrastination Around," various negative feelings that we don't want to feel--like fear, guilt, sadness, confusion, or embarassment--seem to be what distract us from work and lead us to procrastinate. You can do the following exercise to explore your relationship to the projects you have and see whether there are negative feelings that are making it difficult to complete the projects. Get an image or symbol for one or more things that you'd like to get done. Just relax and let an image come to mind. You might want to close your eyes to concentrate better. Take the first image that comes to mind and make a note about it so you can remember it. Now ask: What feelings or sensations are associated with the image? What other feelings are associated with the image? What people are associated with the image?

???
Now get a second image or symbol for the same things that you'd like to get done. Just relax and let an image come to mind. Take the first image that comes to mind and make a note about it so you can remember it. Now ask: What feelings or sensations are associated with this image? What other feelings are associated with the image? What people are associated with the image?

???
Now if you take those two images and put them next to each other, what would they say to each other?

???
Finally, ask the following questions about these things that you'd like to get done: If you don't complete the tasks/projects, what would happen? If you do complete things, what will be the result? Why are you motivated? What feelings are involved? Would some of your feelings like to push things away or get rid of something? Would some of your feelings like to get something or draw something closer? Are you confused about something? If you hear yourself saying, I'm really looking forward to . . . ," see whether there's a negative feeling of some kind that you're avoiding by anticipating being done with the job.

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Now, after having gotten some clarity on the emotions and feelings associated with your task/project, you can check out the exercises and readings on Handling Emotions, and then possibly do an exercise that explores different ways of experiencing feelings.

Turning Procrastination Around

This article originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News Professional Careers section, November 22, 1987, and was 'reprinted' in the Human Resources forum of America Online in April, 1997.

Judging from the people I've talked to, procrastination is one of the biggest problems we have with time. Most people procrastinate about something, whether it's putting off work or not taking time for themselves. What does the word procrastination mean? The dictionary says to procrastinate is "to put off doing something until a future time." Although there is something we really want to do right now, for one reason or another we don't do it.

How is procrastination counterproductive?

Suppose I have a speech I want to prepare. It's Monday, and the speech is to be delivered Thursday. Suppose I have a four-hour block of time today that I can use to prepare the speech, and no other open time before Thursday. This is definitely the best time to work on it, if I am to do a good job. I begin working on the script for the talk. The work goes pretty well. Sentences flow; the work goes almost by itself, effortlessly. Before long, I am so engrossed in the writing that I'm not aware of any feeling of time passing. Nor am I aware of past, present, or future. There's only timeless absorption in my work. Eventually I get a little confused about the message I want to get across. Because I don't face the confusion head on, my mind starts to wander. I look at the clock and realize it's almost time for my favorite TV show. Pretty soon I'm thinking about how I might be able to finish my preparation right after the show is over, before I go to bed. Yes, it seems possible! I think I have enough time. So I put my work aside, and begin to watch the show. After my procrastination, the quality of my experience suffers. Watching the show is not as enjoyable as I'd hoped it would be, because awareness is divided between watching the show and being aware that I have to do my work. Time is passing relentlessly, and it feels like the future is closing in on me. I am watching TV here in the present, feeling anxious and guilty about a job waiting for me in the future. In addition, I have missed an opportunity, and feel less confident and capable as a result. So as a result of procrastination we miss opportunities; suffer feelings like anxiety, guilt, and pressure; end up with a stronger sense of time passing while trying to enjoy intervening activities; feel a greater separation between present and future within our experience; and diminish confidence.

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The process of procrastination: separating present from future

In the example above, where did the stronger feeling of time passing come from? Procrastinating actually creates or intensifies our sense of time passing, and our feeling that the present is separate from the future. Consider my example once again. When I started my work, I really concentrated. The experience was timeless. There was no awareness of the passing of time, and no sense of the future separate from the present. After procrastinating, the river of time began to flow. I anxiously watched time pass, and was subtly aware of my speech waiting for me off in the future. There was a "present time" where I hid from the work up ahead in the "future time." Clearly procrastination had the effect of changing my sense of time, either creating or adding energy to my previous feeling of time passing. However, typically in Western cultures we think that time is simply a physical reality that is independent of our consciousness. It seems to flow at a constant speed, passing quite unalterably from past to present to future no matter what we think, feel, or do, and no matter what perspective we take on time. As Edward Hall noted in his book The Dance of Life (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), time is like a conveyor belt moving a series of empty containers that can be filled with our activities. The conveyor passes through past, present, and future rooms in our experience, and we're always in the present room. With this view of time, we can fool ourselves into thinking that procrastination is simply rescheduling a task to a different container on the conveyor of time. Such rescheduling seems to produce no serious side effects. But in procrastinating we delude ourselves. Time is not simply a fixed physical reality independent of our consciousness. By procrastinating we actually create the conveyor with its containers, along with the feeling of being out of control of time's flow.

What is procrastination?
A redefinition of procrastination is warranted by this deeper understanding of the process. Procrastination is essentially the repression or suppression of an unpleasant feeling that results in temporally separating oneself from a task. We're familiar with spatial separations, where we can build walls or just walk away from something. But we can also temporally separate ourselves from things we don't like. What seems to happen is that the energy of the feeling that we don't like (confusion in my example) is pushed away, and it is transformed into the experience of the conveyor belt of time passing between past, present, and future compartments, with the somewhat dim recollection of our postponed task off in the future somewhere. The energy isn't lost, it's just changed to a different form. So our sense of time passing is a result of transforming the negative energy; time is not just an external reality that is 'real' or predetermined or constant. Time is more flexible than the culture teaches. Since time is this flexible, perhaps we can take the characteristic orientation of procrastination, where we look from the present toward the future, and reverse it--look from the future back towards the present

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and past. If we reverse this view of time, we might be able to loosen the energy fixed by procrastinating.

Turning procrastination around

The presum exercise reverses this perspective, loosening the fixed energy of procrastination and allowing clarity and insight to arise. A resum reviews past accomplishments from the present; a presum looks at what has been done on a project from a point of view in the future. For this exercise, adapted from the exercise with the same name in Get It All Done and Still Be Human by Tony and Robbie Fanning (Ballantine Books, 1979), we're going to assume that six months work on a project has already been done, and then we're going to write down what happened. We'll write in past tense whatever comes to mind about completion of the project during the last six months. To do the exercise (described in more detail in "Turn Time Around"), first identify the project that will be most important in your life during the next six months. Got it? Now set up your environment so you'll be undisturbed for twenty minutes. At the top of a piece of paper, write the date as if it were six months from today. Then write down a few words generally describing the project you've selected. Everything else on the paper will be written *in past tense,* since you are recording what already happened. When you begin to write what happened during the past six months, you may tend to reject certain ideas that come to mind because they don't fit the expectations you have when you look from the present toward the future. However, just be open, take whatever comes to you without censoring, and write down what happened in the order that it comes to mind. Write whatever you remember was accomplished, as well as any insights you had, or personal changes you went through. Take fifteen minutes or so for this process, and write everything in past tense. After you feel that the exercise is complete, take a few more minutes and write down how you experienced the presum. Did it flow better as you continued? Did you get any insights or creative ideas? Did you enjoy doing the exercise? Did you get a sense of completion, peace, or satisfaction? Was it different from your typical way of planning or thinking about projects? This exercise may be done with other time periods--like a week, a month, a year--or you may simply assume it's a given date and look back from there. Some people, instead of making a daily "to-do list," effectively use a presum to write a "done list" for the day. Rather than have to switch back and forth between writing and receiving information, you may prefer to use a tape recorder or have a friend write what you are getting in the exercise. When doing the presum you may get images or scenes which can be sketched and included with your writing. And finally, if after doing a presum, you do not find the results you anticipated, you can do another presum from a point of view even further in the future. You may get a sense of relief, peace, presence, or rest, even if the project didn't appear to be completed. Why? Most of our lives seem to be spent trying to get satisfaction from objects, events, or relationships outside ourselves. Very often we expect that we'll be happier later on, after we complete our goals and projects. But our experience is continually depreciated by the habitual perspective of looking forward to things. We're always trying to get there, rather than allowing ourselves to be here. When we change our perspective on time with an exercise like the presum, we can break through this temporal structure of seeking happiness up ahead along with its feelings of and about time. Then instead of fighting against time, trying to get to our goals somewhere up ahead, we can just be here in peace and 83

presence. We can--if only for a moment--be here instead of trying to get there. We can end up in timelessness. The usual linear view of time, with its conveyor belt and efforts to attain satisfaction, is unnecessary, full of anxiety, and unhealthy. By doing exercises like this one with time we can eventually completely transform the conveyor view. After working with this exercise a while, you can take this dismantling a step farther by practicing Exercises 20 and 21 from Time, Space, and Knowledge by Tarthang Tulku (Berkeley: Dharma Publishing, 1979). If you have already done the presum, you have some experience of the first way of doing Exercise 20: "by visualizing yourself as actually being in the future . . . looking towards 'the present'." With sufficient practice, "you uncover a 'knowing' which is less tied to your self-image." Then you can do the exercise a second way, using "'knowing' to perform the shift in relating to time's pastpresent-future structure." After this second type of practice of Exercise 20, "A More Subtle Structural Reversal" is accomplished with Exercise 21. For exercise instructions see pp. 175-6 of Time, Space, and Knowledge.

Transforming Energy
Through this exercise, mental agitation and emotional discomfort can be transformed. As soon as energy is disconnected from a particular pattern, a new way of being can form. Try this exercise when you feel tired, depressed, negative, or blocked [or when you are holding back from doing something]. Stand well balanced with your feet a comfortable distance apart, your back straight, and your arms at your sides. Clench your fists strongly, hold your breath back in the chest, and tighten your chest until you feel something similar in quality to anger. Then breathing very lightly--without losing the feeling of holding back in the chest--bring your elbows and fists to chest height, strongly press your fists together knuckle to knuckle, and place them in the center of your chest. Make your body and fists very strong and tense. Slowly inhale deeply so your breath rolls down into your belly and draws energy from the base of the spine up into your chest. Hold this energy back internally with the breath and with your chest, as if protecting yourself. Intensify the feeling of blocking and holding back as much as you can, so your energy becomes concentrated. Now with your body still, suddenly, in an instant, thrust your arms straight out, palms forward, releasing all the gathered energy in an explosion, while fully and sharply exhaling, shouting Ha from your chest. It is very important for this movement of the arms to be straight forward, and for the hands to be bent up at the wrists. Every aspect of the tension--physical, mental and emotional--is released simultaneously. Stay for a moment with outstretched arms, fingers wide. In the pause after the explosion, what is the feeling? Now slowly lower your arms to your sides, and stand quietly for a few minutes. Do the exercise three times, standing briefly after each repetition. Then sit . . . for five to ten minutes, expanding the sensations stimulated by producing and releasing tension in this way. It is also possible to do this exercise nine times, repeating this pattern of exercise and sitting three times. . . .

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The exercise can also be done sitting. (pp. 337-9, Tarthang Tulku, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 2. Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing)

Touching Body, Mind, and Energy

The following exercise (Kum Nye Exercise 32: Touching Body, Mind, and Energy) increases circulation and awareness, and will invigorate you when you feel tired, sleepy, or clumsy. Stand well balanced with your feet a comfortable distance apart, your back straight, and your arms relaxed at your sides. Slowly raise your arms in front of you to a little above shoulder height, with your hands about two inches apart, the backs of the hands facing each other and the fingers straight. Picture steel bars next to your palms and begin to move your arms slowly out to the sides, as if you were pushing these steel bars apart. Push with strength until your outstretched arms are a little behind your shoulders. Breathe lightly and evenly through both nose and mouth. [See Breathing Exercise for more complete instructions.] Keep your belly, chest, and thighs relaxed and concentrate lightly on the base of the spine. If you feel painful tenseness in the muscles of your upper and middle back, move more gently. Now imagine that the steel bars are near the backs of your hands, and slowly move your hands toward the front, as if you were pushing the bars together. Notice the different quality of the movement in this direction. Feel the energy surrounding your hands and arms, while still concentrating loosely on the base of the spine. Release the tension in your arms very slowly, and lower them to your sides. Stand for two minutes, expanding the sensations of energy. Then continue the exercise, three or nine times, standing with your arms at your sides after each repetition. When you finish, sit for five minutes or more, sensing the energy flow in your body. (pp. 195-6, Kum Nye Relaxation, Part 1. Dharma Publishing, 1978, by Tarthang Tulku)

Principles for Breaking the Limits of Time

Keys to optimal productivity, creativity, and well-being
During peak experiences there's no awareness of time flowing. The better your productivity and sense of well-being, the less you're aware of time passing. Ask periodically: "Am I timelessly involved in what I'm doing?" (See Excerpts from Results in No Time and Linear vs. Timeless Views.) Your sense of time (SOT) is conceptual, and measures clock time. Your feeling of time passing (FTP) is a feeling, and measures how much you're resisting what you're doing. (See Three Faces of Time and the Spectrum of Time Management.) There is no inherent limit to what can be accomplished in a given period of clock time. Pressure doesn't seem to be built into certain jobs; it seems to be added to neutral situations because of our attitude, perspective, or confusion about values and goals. The pressure we feel is directly proportional to how much we're resisting what we're trying to get done. Our typical deadline perspective

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is that we're in the present looking off toward the distant future where there's a deadline, and the deadline is relentlessly closing in on us. (See Where Does Time Pressure Come From?) In general, in order to experience time pressure, and anxiety, you have to have a position separate from what you're doing or observing. The greater the separation, the stronger the FTP, whether it's 'moving' quickly or slowly. If there's no psychological time, there's no conflict or separation at all. (See Clock Watching.) The feeling that there isn't enough time, or that work is endless or overwhelming, or that time is out of control or is going too fast (or too slowly), is always accompanied by a linear view of time, and is never part of a timeless, peak perspective. (See Qualities of Deadline Pressure Scenarios.) The linear view of time is a "waste of time" because it involves the (perhaps subtle) seeking of fulfillment elsewhere (most often in the future) as well as a division of awareness among past, present, and future. Our planning usually involves this linear view with its thinking about the future room we've created separate from the present room. (See Different Perspectives of Planning.) Seeing and feeling separate future rooms within the flow of time is an impediment to creativity, productivity, and wellbeing. Our typical way of estimating time is based on the concept that each and every unit of clock time holds the same limited capacity for accomplishment. (See Different Perspectives of Planning.) Most conventional time management (CTM) seminars cannot resolve our problems with time because they don't touch the limits built into the linear time paradigm (LT) that usually underlies CTM. (See Two Paradigms: Performance & Well-Being Depend on the Paradigm of Time.) "While with these [CTM] methods you may alleviate some time pressures temporarily, because your state of being is not affected, you never generate any deep or lasting changes in how you view and interact with time. . . . Ultimately you return to your old ways, and with new frustration." (Hunt and Hait) Lasting, substantial control and use of time, to increase health, productivity, and creativity, is possible only if we understand time, our attitudes toward it, and how it works--and this is not usually taught in CTM seminars. Rather than CTM's focus on what we want to do, inner time management (ITM) gives methods to optimize the moment-by-moment way we relate to, or the extent to which we are involved in, our current activity. By finding the peaceful, yet most productive 'zone' at the center of our whirlwind of activities, we can transform our feelings of time flowing--including overwhelm, time pressure, anxiety, and boredom. For people in all but the most routine jobs, learning and consistently using both CTM and ITM methods is both valuable and necessary in order to continually improve our lives both personally and professionally. By combining ITM practices with CTM, we can not only avoid the empty drivenness that readily accompanies CTM with its usual focus on results, but also open up new levels of performance and fulfillment that are simply unavailable with CTM alone. A feeling of time passing (FTP) is created when you avoid a negative feeling. (See How Our Sense of Time Flow is Created.) All of your FTP is due to repressed emotions. Without a FTP everything would be spontaneous and effortless. When you experience time, try to find out what you're feeling, and focus directly on the feeling. How your FTP is created/strengthened:

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Rather than being aware of some feeling, the feeling is repressed or suppressed and you lose a measure of confidence. The throat/neck constricts a bit, a subtle anxiety is created, and you become aware of time passing either more quickly or more slowly. Energy is diverted to the head as you think about how you'll be happier when you get a desired object, find or improve a relationship, or complete a task or project. The linear view of time is experienced, with time flowing from past to present to future. Your attention is divided among the three times.

Procrastination begins with some kind of negative feeling that distracts us from what we're doing. Procrastination is a really good example of how we create or intensify our sense of time. (See Turning Procrastination Around.)

Three Faces of Time and the Spectrum of Time Management

This article originally appeared in the The Learning Curve in April, 1998, pp. 1, 4, The Networker, April, 1998, 1, 4-5, and The ASTD Reporter, April, 1998, p. 4.

Abstract:
The purpose of conventional time management (CTM) is to help us produce more and decrease the anxiety and pressure we feel about time. Since American-European cultures focus on clock time and events in physical time, time management in Western countries has become simply a matter of choosing, organizing, and scheduling events. Although time management seminar graduates have been able to accomplish more as a result of their training, there is growing recognition that they still feel like they don't have enough time, and some feel like things have worsened. Instead of focusing just on events in time, on what we're doing, it may serve us to also explore how things are going-the range of experience from feeling overwhelmed and pressured, to things flowing so well we're not aware of time passing. Exploring how it's going, the quality of time, is the domain of inner time management (ITM). For people in all but the most routine jobs, learning and consistently using both CTM and ITM methods is both valuable and often necessary in order to continually improve our lives both personally and professionally. For most of us neither CTM nor ITM by itself resolves our issues with time. But by combining the discipline of planning and organizing what we do with methods of improving the way we do things, there is no limit to our productivity and well-being.

What Guarantees Optimal Productivity and Well-Being?

This article originally appeared in The Learning Curve and The Networker in January, 1997.

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Most businesses these days like to call themselves "results-driven." In a typical company the primary concern is on productivity and the bottom line. Hoever, this emphasis on results can negatively affect employee well-being. By focusing on results without a balanced attention to their well-being, employees may produce a great deal during a long work crunch, yet burn out in the process. Optimizing results does not guarantee optimal employee well-being. Conventional productivity measures can provide very helpful feedback on work progress, but besides the fact that they ignore employee well-being, we can question the scope for which such a measure can be applied. How many of us have jobs where all we do all day long is make one or two products? Most of us also do countless other tasks that are not included in conventional productivity measures. How can productivity be assessed at times when we're not making the products that are measured? To foster truly continuous improvement, we need feedback that is always available, no matter what task we're doing, and even when we're changing tasks. So what does guarantee results and well-being?

Mastery Results from Increasing Involvement

What if we took a close look at what we do when we successfully improve productivity? Suppose you're preparing a speech. And suppose you're really into it, very involved. You write down a few key ideas that you want to present, then visualize yourself giving the speech. Then you feel a little puzzled about the order of the ideas. There's some momentum to write more ideas down, and there's also some motivation to feel the confusion. You are stuck and don't know how to proceed. You look at the clock and wonder if you should take a break. You feel your involvement in the task decreasing, and consider ways to completely avoid the task. You've reached what I call a transition point where your productivity can either decrease, continue gradually, or maybe even improve. You know that taking a break now would waste time. You'd still have to face things when you came back. So you drop your distracting thinking about escapes and concentrate on the task again. You remember being confused about the order of ideas, and then realize it was actually the confusion that you wanted to avoid. This time you let yourself get confused. Your thoughts go back and forth about how to proceed, and then finally you get some insight on rearranging the ideas to be presented. Now you're really involved again. The work's flow picks up again and gradually accelerates beyond your productivity before the confusion arose. (You can also check out an extended example of changing involvement.) What facilitated the improvement in productivity? Wasn't it to feel the confusion and see how you had decreased your involvement and pulled away from the task? Wasn't it necessary to distinguish productive directions from counterproductive directions, then choose a productive direction and gradually become even more involved than you were before getting confused? Could we summarize and say that increasing productivity resulted from noticing the transition point where your involvement could either increase or decrease, and then choosing a direction of increasing involvement? Isn't this the natural way that we improve productivity without even thinking about it? 88

At work you can periodically recall your recent experience as if you were viewing a videotape replay, and look for ways in which you weren't completely involved, just as tennis players look for ways to improve their stroke. A high degree of involvement implies a melding or identification of worker and objects worked on, a timeless and effortless flow of events, and an unrestricted sense of openness pervading the entire scenario. If you felt any separation from work or the objects being worked on, if you and time's ordinary flow weren't completely swept up in the energy of work, or if your work space felt a bit emotional or heavy, you have identified a key to improving your work game. This way of noticing your level of involvement provides self-actualizing feedback useful in directly approaching peak performance.

Optimizing Involvement Optimizes Well-Being

At this point there may be a voice in the background saying "My company would benefit greatly from this, but what would I get out of it?" The answer: your health and level of well-being should gradually improve. Recall a time when you significantly improved your involvement in a work project by breaking through strong emotional resistance. When you broke through, wasn't there an immediate change in the sense of well-being and satisfaction that you experienced? Was there a decrease in the feeling of being at the effect of things, or an increase in confidence? Did the breakthrough boost your overall outlook on life? The increase in well-being we experience during such breakthroughs seems proportional to the amount of emotional resistance transformed. So tracking involvement is a powerful means of increasing productivity and well-being. And the natural practice of tracking involvement has the important benefit that it can be used while focusing on any task, as you switch between tasks, or even when there is no apparent task at hand. But there's another benefit: increasing quality.

Optimizing Involvement Optimizes Quality

Noticing your increasing or decreasing involvement is the foundation for continuous quality improvement. What else triggers improving a work process except a transition point-conflict, unnecessary complexity, confusion, or wasted energy or effort? These disruptions in work flow are what draw attention to something that can be changed for the better. When something slows the flow, your involvement in the work process is lessened in a particular way that can serve as a focus for inquiry into the nature of the blockage. Similarly, defects in a product are discernible only by means of a decrease in our involvement when we are using or perceiving them. For example, a car is a high quality product when the driver can feel one with it. (Some years ago Volkswagen advertised that in contrast to other auto manufacturers that distinguished the driver from the auto, Volkswagen's distinction as an auto manufacturer was that they considered the auto and the driver to be one.) If the steering mechanism of a race car is designed so that the driver usually feels somewhat out of control when making high-speed turns, this decrease in involvement indicates an opportunity for increasing quality. Whenever a product does not meet a customer's need or expectation, the customer is upset, and cannot be 100% engrossed or appreciative when using the product.

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So if a company encourages its employees to focus on increasing their involvement, the likelihood of simultaneous and continuous improvement of quality, well-being, and productivity is maximized.

Involvement-Driven Work Optimizes Work Capacity

Some managers might fear that people would take advantage of this system and use it as license to focus on self-improvement and personal satisfaction, causing a decrease in productivity. This objection, while natural, is not well founded. First of all, efforts to increase involvement often require letting go of personal desires and preferences in favor of dedication to a larger cause. But more to the point, these efforts do not improve the separate self--they require that we go beyond individual boundaries and merge with the work process. It seems we cannot reach this satisfaction we desire by approaching it as ego-bound individuals. Any efforts along these lines would be frustrated, since the level of fulfillment in work seems to correspond precisely to the degree that we are free of such separation. Second, the objection that tracking involvement might cause a decrease in productivity may simply reflect business's tactical rather than strategic approach to progress. Business seems to be in such a hurry to produce, to improve this quarter's financial results, it can hardly see the possibility or importance of increasing employees' work capacity, the average rate at which tasks can be accomplished while maintaining one's level of well-being. While it may be true that in the short run, focusing on improving involvement can lead to lower productivity, eventually whatever conflict preoccupied us at the transition points would be cleared up, and our work capacity--including our awareness, available energy, and level of confidence--would be greater, allowing us to accomplish everything from then on at a faster rate. So it pays to adequately handle our conflicts and improve our work capacity. Both we and the company will benefit in the long run. However, often employees tend to be viewed mechanically, as if having a fixed work capacity. Workers are seen as capable of producing more for limited periods--while they are willing to put up with higher levels of stress, but they are often not seen to be capable of substantial changes in work capacity. Nevertheless, it may be that at this point in history, significant changes in our productivity will result only from improving the work capacity of individuals. The quick technological fix, reorg, or downsizing may not be sufficient. So how can we optimize our work efforts? Probably not by focusing on results, which doesn't guarantee improvement of well-being and quality. By focusing on improving all aspects of involvement in our work, we can optimize productivity, well-being, quality, and work capacity all at once.

Twelve Questions
Peak performance research shows that optimizing your involvement in work will simultaneously optimize productivity, well-being, quality, and creativity, no matter what your task or environment. To foster optimal involvement, periodically consider the following questions that contrast various aspects of

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ordinary work from peak performance. These questions are related to the twelve dimensions of the Optimal Work circle. 1. Are you applying effort or control to something that feels separate from you, or is your activity flowing effortlessly by itself? 2. Do things feel familiar, somewhat predictable, or even habitual, or does each new moment, along with all that appears in the momentary scenario, seem spontaneous and fresh? 3. Are you looking forward to getting things done, or are you currently fulfilled within your work-inprogress? 4. Do objects and events take up space and appear to be separate and dispersed, or are do they seem intimately connected in and even as one space? 5. Is there a private space or personal world that feels separate from everything outside, or do inner and outer, subjective and objective appear to be inseparable facets of the same undivided space? 6. Is there a sense of self that stands apart from experience and externals, or do you feel identified with, or the same as, what's happening? 7. Is knowledge simply something that you or others possess or lack, or do you feel intimately part of what's around you, knowing things that are happening 'from inside' them? 8. Is knowledge identification, categorization, judgment, and detached observation, or an illuminating clarity merged with the subject being explored? 9. Are there boundaries and divisions among your self, mind, body, and personality, or is fulfillment and satisfaction being drawn naturally and directly from a sense of wholeness? 10. Are you driven by a desire for pleasure or a need, or is everything being found to be immediately and inherently fulfilling? 11. Do you notice a feeling of time flowing around you, or are you timelessly involved in something? 12. Does reality seem solid, fixed, and substantial, or does everything seem wondrously ephemeral?

Reviews of Time-Space-Knowledge Books

"The TSK books speak for time, space, and knowledge, which means they speak for openness and the choice of knowledge. But they do not own or possess time, space, and knowledge; these three facets of being belong to everyone." (p. xii, Mastery of Mind)

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Bibliography
TSK. Tarthang Tulku. Time, Space, and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality. Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1977. DOT. Ralph H. Moon and Stephen Randall, eds. Dimensions of Thought: Current Explorations in Time, Space, and Knowledge. 2 vols. Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1980. LOK. Tarthang Tulku. Love of Knowledge. Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1987 KTS. Tarthang Tulku. Knowledge of Time and Space. Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1990. MOM. Mastery of Mind: Perspectives on Time, Space, and Knowledge. Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1993. VOK. Tarthang Tulku. Visions of Knowledge: Liberation of the Modern Mind. Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1993. DTS. Tarthang Tulku. Dynamics of Time and Space. Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1994. LtOK. Light of Knowledge: Essays on the Interplay of Knowledge,Time, and Space, Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1997. SDTS. Tarthang Tulku. Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space. Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1997. Click for information on Dharma Publishing.

Time, Space, and Knowledge

At every turn, the reader is invited to look with fresh eyes at the structures we have all learned to take for granted. Does time really move from past to present to future, or could we dive into its structure in a completely different way? Does subject truly perceive object, or could we reverse their relationship? What is the guarantee for the reality of what we see and take for granted? Asking such questions invites knowledge to take form in new ways. Hailed for its lucid, penetrating presentation, Time, Space, and Knowledge blends reasoning and experiential inquiry to offer each reader a unique path to insight and transformation. Challenging and disquieting, yet deeply exhilarating, this pathbreaking work gives readers a language for asking the questions that our conventional training teaches us to ignore. It awakens a knowledge we have somehow always known is there. Time, Space, and Knowledge unfolds vigorously, following a careful structure that takes the reader progressively deeper into the vision. Thirty-five exercises play a central role in the text, and much of the discussion comes in the form of commentary to the exercises. The approach is challenging and bracing,

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a kind of martial arts for the mind. Perhaps this is one reason that readers regularly remark that they return to the book again and again, finding new riches each time. A bold step beyond conventional modes of thinking, this book reunites science, philosophy, and direct experience through analysis and exercises, unveiling a profoundly liberating way of investigating ourselves and our world. "A rich and rewarding book; a remarkable attempt to bring us to the limits (and beyond) of our capacity for thought and awareness." --Parabola Magazine "Nothing less than a challenge to every premise and presupposition ever made concerning the nature of existence--leaves even the most spiritually hip with nowhere to stand." --Yoga Journal ". . . lays out a complex structure in which space, time, and knowledge are understood to be operating at three different levels. The intention is to make clear that we cannot stop with one interpretation or understanding; that knowledge must be dynamic and self-referential. The presentation doubles back on itself, undermining its own claims, using structure against structure." (p. 62, Visions of Knowledge)

Love of Knowledge
Love of Knowledge traces out links between space, time, and knowledge and our ordinary understanding. The presentation inquires primarily into the structures of conventional, 'first-level' thought. Only when these structures have been identified and analyzed does he focus shift to a 'higher' level of knowledge." The starting point for Love of Knowledge is an investigation into 'technological knowledge', the patterns of knowing we all rely on and the assumptions that underlie them. The inquiry then shifts to investigate the role of the self as the one who knows: the self as perceiver, interpreter, narrator, owner, witness, and objective entity. An alternative way of knowing is introduced in which there are no fixed positions to maintain and no one to maintain them. The implications of this 'no-source' knowledge are explored in depth. Educated not to see certain kinds of limitations in operation, we fail to benefit fully from past mistakes or to see clearly the future consequences of our present actions. We live out our limits instead of developing new possibilities and awakening all the resources available to us. Love of Knowledge provides the analytic and experiential tools to reverse these patterns. It uses the logic of prevailing forms of understanding to call those forms into question. While Love of Knowledge has been especially well-received by individuals systematically trained in our prevailing ways of thinking, it also offers fifty experiential exercises and fifty diagrams that engage the visual, 'right-brain' aspects of knowledge. Demanding yet accessible, this book bridges the gap between theory and practice. Vital and stimulating, it has been used in introuctory philosophy classes and has attracted special interest from systems theorists.

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"The exercises provide experimental grounding that makes the abstract questions of philosophy suddenly real and important. . . . There's nothing else like Love of Knowledge for breaking down habitual patterns of thinking and providing direct experience of alternatives." --Dr. J. VanderMey, MidMichigan Community College. "Few books will prove to be as illuminating on our path as Love of Knowledge." --New England Review of Books

Knowledge of Time and Space

"Aware of the lineage of knowledge, we can open each point, each present singularity of oneness, finding in each point the unique occasion of the whole. If we listen with our hearts and with our seeing, we can hear a message being broadcast: The present is not stagnant, not determined. There is no 'between' as a separate position, no 'one' that is not 'all', no 'apart from' in what is unique." Knowledge of Time and Space celebrates the power of time and space to free us from all limitations. At times light and dancing, at times deep and provocative, the text is like a work of art that steadily reveals new facets of a unified vision. Many readers have commented on the innovative use of language and the playful presentation. Whether pointing toward 'the feel of the field', 'the whole of zero', or 'appearance as the echo of itself', the author succeeds in communicating the delight of an unbounded inquiry. Elegant and luminous, Knowledge of Time and Space invites active articipation in creation. It opens a path to new vision for readers less interested in formal presentation and more attuned to the flashing, penetrating presence of knowledge as it operates throughout time and space. Organized into short chapters that at times read almost like aphorisms, it offers countless starting points for inquiry. It follows no ordinary logic, but instead invites each reader to embark on a journey that takes its own form in the course of its unfolding. "For too long we have turned our backs on our human potential--" Chapters on Interpretive Structures, Fabric of Time, the Knower in Space, Field Mechanism, and Inquiry Without Goal invite us to unfold the Time, Space, and Knowledge vision, challenging all that confines and isolates us from what we can know, feel, and be. ". . . a step by step approach to liberating consciousness." --Meditation Magazine. "Imparts an overwhelming richness of nuance to our understanding of the very foundations of our existence." --Dr. M. E. Osinovsky, Physicist "Tarthang Tulku's proposition that by knowing time and space we can know the underlying nature of ourselves and the world is coherent with the perspective of both physics and metaphysical intuitions." -Claudio Naranjo, Psychotherapist "Insists that a greater knowing is our natural birthright and that we have the ability to recover it." -Francis H. Cook, U. of California, Riverside

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Dynamics of Time and Space

Presenting images and ideas of startling originality and inspiring beauty, Dynamics of Time and Space challenges our persistent attempts to be the owners of knowledge and invites us to join in the play of knowledge that informs all appearance. Space is revealed as the nexus of reality and the dynamic of time as the hidden source of meaning. Cutting through the limiting assumptions that keep us from the knowledge we need, this rich work reveals space as the source of appearance and time as the source of meaning. Through analysis, speculation and creative imagination it shows us how we can learn to activate time, restore space, and enter a magical universe where the future is now and the impossible is always available. A bridge to a brighter, more creative side of reality. "Profound yet accessible . . . The 25 exercises in the book aim at transforming one's ways of understanding, of thinking, and of being; to develop an intimacy with time, space, and knowledge--with consequences that will show up clearly in one's life." Willis Harman, Noetic Sciences Resource, Editors' Favorite. "A unique doorway into . . . the knowledge of infinity and eternity." --Duane Elgin, author, Voluntary Simplicity and Awakening and Earth "Profound and enjoyable . . . stimulates the reader's creative imagination." --Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., coauthor of Personal Mythology; editor, Dreamtime and Dreamwork

Visions of Knowledge
"Although the TSK vision does not point out the direction for change or indicate what shape and form it will take, it does encourage us to discover how knowledge has unfolded in time and space. By presenting our own history in a new light, it sees through the past toward what could happen differently. By inviting insight into how the patterns that we follow establish themselves in our perceptions and the operation of our consciousness, it activates new ways to use the power of the mind. It moves toward a new frontier of knowledge, where nothing is fixed in advance." Thousands of years of civilization have not brought us much closer to achieving the goals that all human beings share. Why is this so? Why does it seem so unusual even to raise the question? Do we really accept that human nature is limited in this fundamental way? Are we willing to challenge this assumption? Visions of Knowledge makes clear how knowledge can reveal itself through inquiry. The opening section of the book consists of sixty questions. What is the nature of what we accept as true? How do our perceptions interact with what is perceived? When we question time, space, and knowledge on the ordinary level, what aspects of experience does this questioning bring out? What knowledge does it stimulate? When we turn away from inquiry, what dynamic is at work? As the reader explores these questions, the value of inquiry and a style for putting it into practice emerge. The text encourages us to develop willingness, discipline, imagination, and speculation as tools for such an inquiry.

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The second part of the book consists of nine chapters. Each starts by taking the perspective of knowledge itself--a view that looks beyond the concerns of the self. A central theme is the patterning of the mind, and there is a steady focus on structures of perception that establish limits in space and time as well as knowledge: limits, beginnings and endings, points, etc. The book closes with two appendices, one a series of brief comments by students of the TSK vision and the other a topical outline of the vision, based on the structure of Knowledge of Time and Space. "A tool for creative thinking . . . clarifies the different ways in which we may ferret out hidden assumptions and challenge traditional thinking and patterns of consciousness. . . . This is the visionary Tarthang Tulku at the zenith of his powers . . . the jewel of the crown of the TSK series." --New Age Retailer "Visions of Knowledge does not provide a set of universal conceptual prescriptions we can simply swallow with the hopes of waking up the next day cured from the chronic lack of freedom and feeling of sameness characteristic of most of our lives. No, instead, the reader is invited to engage with the dynamic inquiry, following it in directions which are unspecified in advance." --Ron Purser, Ph.D., Center for Organization Development, Loyola University "Answers are not the purpose of our questioning. When we learn how to ask fundamental questions in ways that are fresh and alive, we conduct into our lives an intelligence that applies directly to our own immediate circumstances. In activating this kind of inquiry, we can rely on the great masters and thinkers of the past for inspiration and guidance, but their answers cannot be our answers. We must each individually take up the challenge of knowledge for ourselves." (pp. ix-x, Visions of Knowledge)

Dimensions of Thought: Current Explorations in Time, Space, and Knowledge

In 1980, shortly after the appearance of Time, Space, and Knowledge, Dharma Publishing inaugurated the Perspectives on TSK Series to explore the ways in which TSK could be used to clarify issues in different fields of knowledge and expand on themes from the TSK books. Dimensions of Thought: Current Explorations in Time, Space, and Knowledge was the first publication in this series. The essays found in these two volumes, mostly written by recognized authorities in their fields, show how individuals have sought to come to terms with the TSK vision. The final section of the second volume contains short notes and observations in which individuals report on their own personal experience. Edited by Ralph Moon and Stephen Randall.

Volume One
Foreword: Ocean of Knowledge, by Tarthang Tulku A Revolutionary Vision, by Ralph H. Moon Orientation to Time, Space, and Knowledge, by Tarthang Tulku Opening Time, by Tarthang Tulku A Socratic Approach to TSK, by Robert C. Scharff

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Beyond Outer and Inner Space, by Kaisa Puhakka Psychological Growth in and Beyond Psychotherapy, by Bill Jackson Time out of Mind, by Edward S. Casey TSK, Social Science, and the American Dream, by James Shultz Tarthang Tulku and Merleau-Ponty, by David Michael Levin TSK and the Mind-Body Problem, by James E. White

Volume Two
Human Development and Ultimate Reality, by Arthur Egendorf 'Space' and Psychophysics, by Alan Foster Knowing by Doing, by Ramakrishna Puligandla Phenomenology and TSK, by Donald Beere TSK: A Teacher's Evaluation, by Charles Thomas Davis III Experience Takes Place, by Robert D. Romanyshyn

Mastery of Mind
This volume of essays on the TSK vision was published in spring of 1993. A comparison with the first two volumes of the Perspectives on TSK series shows a decided shift away from theory and comparisons toward practical applications. The essays span a wide range of topics. A noted astronomer reflects on the challenge that TSK poses to science; a graduate student presents data from his Ph.D. thesis on therapeutic applications of TSK, and his adviser discusses ways to improve such research in the future; a systems theorist shows how TSK can revolutionize his field, and two specialists in organizational transformation undertake a review of their own discipline in light of the TSK vision; a philosopher links TSK to the field of philosophical anthropology. These are essays in the literal sense of the word: attempts to come to terms with fundamental issues. Their integrity and uniform respect for the TSK vision are reminders of how much the vision has to contribute to knowledge in all its aspects.

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Contents
Pleasure in the Consistency of the World: A Test Case to Explore the Obstacles a Scientist May Meet in Studying the TSK Vision, by H. C. Van de Hulst A Philosophical Approach to TSK: Ontology and Identity, by Arnaud Pozin To Dwell in Knowledge: Rethinking the Cartesian Cogito, by Jack Petranker Knowing and Organizational Being, by Ramakrishnan V. Tenkasi 'Opening Up' Open Systems Theory: Toward a Socio-Ecological Understanding of Organizational Environments, by Ronald E. Purser Knowledge, Learning, and Change: Exploring the Systems/Cybernetics Perspective, by Alfonso Montuori The Psychotherapeutic Potential of Time, Space, and Knowledge, by Christopher Jansen-Yee Methodological and Theoretical Issues in TSK Research, by Donald Beere Return to bibliography. Return to the TSKA homepage.

Light of Knowledge: Essays on the Interplay of Knowledge, Time, and Space

This volume of essays on the TSK vision was published in 1997.

Contents
Geographies of Knowledge, by Tarthang Tulku Transparency, by Hal Gurish Nonordinary Knowledge, by Don Beere Exploring Time, Space, and Knowledge in the Conducting of Professional Life, by Ronald Purser TSK: Vehicle, Common Ground, and Vision, by Steve Randall Creative Inquiry: From Instrumental Knowing to Love of Knowledge, by Alfonso Montuori Epistemology in Paradise: The Spatial Embodiment of Knowledge and Value, by Alan Malachowski

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Turning Inward Outward: Toward a Public Self and the Common Good, by Jack Petranker Bracketed Bodies, Pivotal Bodies: Trajectories of the Postmodern Self, by Lee Nichol 'Hard Knowledge' and the Time, Space, and Knowledge Vision, by Maxim Osinovsky Dimensionality: A Cultural/Historical Approach, by John Smyrl Copyright 1996 by Stephen Randall.

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