Integral Time Management

Integral Praxis of Time

I've been thinking lately about what an integral approach to the topic of time management might look like.  Because in a career counselling or career coaching context, time management is a practical and important topic.  But as far as I can tell, time management -even the term - tends to evoke a rationalist, "right-hand path" mindset, to use the integral term.  Working in a predominantly formal-operational mode, a person learns to prioritize tasks, chunk out various amounts of time to achieve those tasks, and so on.

I have admittedly not been very good at this for a while - it seems to me that I used to be rather better at time management - and I have had trouble figuring out why.  Well, I think part of the problem is that I have been trying to fit myself to a conception of time management that no longer works me, given my dynamic dialectical awareness of time.

With integral consciousness comes a sense that what is at least as important than time management, in its narrow sense, is timeliness.  A prominent writer in this area is Bill Torbert, who has developed much in the are of an integral approach to action inquiry in real time.  Within action inquiry in real time, I believe a person co-enacts a process dimension of time, which is what gives rise to the sense of evolution being much more than a scientific concept.  It becomes a felt sense or lived experience.  Time just feels like it is going somewhere important, and the individual wants to participate in that.  So, it seems to me that a pragmatic value or quality of active participation in the flow of time, as experienced dynamically, is that of timeliness.

Perhaps we could look for a synthesis of time-management and timeliness through the quadrant model, with timeliness being the experience felt in the UL, and appropriately managed clock time being organized in the UR.  And of course, the collective dimensions are important as well.  In particular, if a person with integral consciousness wants to have career satisfaction, he or she would be wise to look for an employer that organizes his or her business holocratically - or at the least, values the mutual co-arising of timeliness and time management.  Either that or work for oneself.  Since there are not many of these organizations out there yet, this means the latter option is going to be a more feasible one for many of us.

I have left out one really important aspect of an integral approach to time-management: not timeliness but timelessness.  An integral action inquiry needs to make contact with timelessness, or allow space for the sense of Witness consciousness to emerge - it is inevitably difficult to write about something that is experiencing the writing, not an object of it! 

For this aspect, I think one of Andrew Cohen's recent teachings is helpful.  I have been quite critical in the past of shadow aspects in Cohen's teaching and interpersonal relationships, and I remain wary of the seeming lack of attention paid to psychodynamic issues in his work and in his community.  I have submitted to them several times my interesting in seeing an issue of WIE devoted to integral psychotherapy and coaching. That said, I find his recent teaching on spiritual inquiry to be very illuminating.  In particular, I appreciate his emphasis on a practice of spiritual inquiry that balances allowing oneself to "not already know", on the one hand, and to "want to know" on the other.  In Cohen's own words, "not already knowing, at the deepest level, aligns us with the ground of all being, that primordial emptiness, inherently free and already liberated, that is the Self as unmanifest consciousness.  Wanting to know, passionately, energetically wanting to understand, aligns us simultaneously with the Authentic Self, which is the evolutionary impulse of deepest manifest expression of consciousness.  So the perfect evolutionary posture is one that is dynamically poised between those two opposites."

These are some initial thoughts on a topic that I think is of great interest and importance to integrally-oriented folks interested in feeling engaged and satisfied in their work-life, or really any time in their lives where action is required!