I like to think of Time as “squishy”—it expands and contracts according to laws of physics incomprehensible to humans. It’s sort of like that gooey foam that you spray into cracks and crevices, spreading out to fill the void, but staying small if there’s no space for it to grow.

So I might say to a friend, “Let’s meet for coffee Tuesday morning, during my squishy time.” This means that the time allocated might be a quick cuppa or morph into a long, meandering morning, and it doesn’t matter to me which way it goes.

Squishy Time is Time that allows for Possibility.

Now, this image of Time was firmly in my mind long before I heard the Tenth Doctor say, “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually — from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint — it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.” (Doctor Who, “Blink”)

Though I haven’t used the phrase “squishy time” for a while, I still like the idea that Time isn’t a hard and fixed thing, but an organic, flowing entity. Unfortunately, most of the U.S. works within a linear construct—you set a time to meet, you conduct your business, you end the meeting, and then you go on to the next thing. Boom. “Done and dusted,” as my daughter says.

The concept of Time gets a lot of, ahem, air time. Goodreads has 8,767 quotes about Time, and a 0.52 second search on Google of “Time Management” yields me about 5,890,000,000 results. Whoa! The first thing that pops up is this from Mindtools.com: “Time Management Definition: ‘Time management’ is the process of organizing and planning how to divide your time between specific activities. Good time management enables you to work smarter – not harder – so that you get more done in less time, even when time is tight and pressures are high.”

Another half second search and nearly half a billion results later, I discover that it’s highly probable that at any given moment, thousands of people are crammed into an auditorium somewhere, listening to some efficiency expert extol the virtues of “getting more done in less time.” Good grief! I feel stressed out just reading about time being tight and pressures being high.

When I hear the phrase “time management,” I picture taking everything I do—every menial task, every fleeting pleasure, every cherished moment—and trying to cram it into a suitcase. I have to sit on it, jump up and down on it, even, in an effort to get the darn thing to close. And just when I thing I have it all neatly sealed up, I discover a tiny slip of something caught in the zipper.

So I have given up on “managing” Time. It doesn’t want to be manhandled, and really, it’s kind of egotistical to think I have any right to try to wrangle Time to my will. Instead, I love what my friend Danna said she learned at a seminar: it’s all about Choice Management. Choices. I can wrap my head around managing my choices, and thinking of Time in this way feels liberating. My lifetime is made up of a finite series of moments; how I choose to use each moment matters.

Thank you, Dear Reader, for choosing to use some of your precious moments to read this. If you enjoy my content, I invite you to share with your friends and to subscribe, or better yet, become a member—I’ll share a fun surprise box with you each month to help you connect with this community and continue the conversation.

Until next time,