Time

As a chauffeur, I spend much of my working day evaluating time. On any given journey, the distance is known, but the time can only ever be estimated. Experience helps, as does the GPS, but neither knows what's around the next corner.

I experienced this recently while assessing an urgent booking request. I knew the distance, but I couldn't be certain of the time. I might arrive early, on time, or late. The first two outcomes would pass unnoticed; the third could damage my reputation. I couldn't control how long the journey would take, but I could control whether I accepted that uncertainty. So I declined the job.

It reminded me of something often said in sport: control the controllable.

Perhaps there's something in that idea that extends beyond sport, or chauffeuring.

A conventional working day usually comes with structure. There is a time to arrive, meetings in the diary, a lunch break and a time to leave. Much of the day has already been decided. That structure might restrict freedom, but it also provides something in return: predictability.

An unstructured day appears to offer the opposite. There is no fixed start, no fixed finish and nobody deciding when lunch should happen. On paper, the freedom is complete.

But freedom and control aren't necessarily the same thing.

Make yourself available for work without knowing when that work will arrive and the day starts to behave differently. An hour might become productive immediately, or it might be spent waiting for something that never comes. Have lunch now or wait? Stay another hour or go home? Use the gap for something else or remain available?

There may be more free time in the day, yet less freedom to use it.

A structured day can contain far less empty space and still feel more generous. When the next commitment is known, the spaces around it have boundaries. Forty-five minutes can become lunch, a coffee, a walk, preparation or a conversation. The time has somewhere to begin and somewhere to end.

Perhaps predictability gives time a kind of usefulness that quantity alone doesn't.

There is another version at the opposite extreme. Everything that needs doing at work is finished, but there are still forty-five minutes on the clock. The structure remains even though its purpose has disappeared.

So we stay.

Which leaves an interesting space somewhere between complete structure and complete freedom.

What if the ideal day is neither?

Perhaps it's a day where the structure forms around the choices we make. Commitments give the day its shape, but there is still enough freedom to decide which commitments belong there. Work fits around availability rather than availability simply being surrendered to work.

That doesn't necessarily mean working less. A highly structured day might be long, demanding and completely full. An unstructured day might contain only a few hours of actual work.

Yet the first can somehow feel more controlled.

Perhaps that's because time has value beyond productivity. A long lunch, an hour spent reading or an afternoon with someone we enjoy doesn't need to achieve anything to be worthwhile. What seems to change the experience is whether that was where we intended the time to go.

And maybe that's why the phrase control the controllable keeps coming back to me.

We can't control time itself. We can't know exactly what will happen within the next hour, however carefully we plan it.

But perhaps we can influence the shape around it.

Enough structure to provide certainty.

Enough freedom to make choices.

Maybe the best use of time sits somewhere between the two.

Another note from the front seat.