Magical Thinking

and the Illusion of Time

A week after coffee date dude did that thing where he showed up 30 minutes late to our plans, it happened again! Different context, same result.

While I love the controlled environment of my home office, every once in a while I crave a buzzy space to spice up my routine. And if I can get a friend to join me, even better!

This is where I found myself recently, laptop in hand and looking for a spot to perch at a local coffee shop while I waited for my friend. I should have been able to sit down, open my laptop, and begin…with or without a work-bestie. But on this occasion it was a new work-bestie, at a new coffee shop and I found myself wanting to wait to begin.

Wait being the operative word, because said-new-work-bestie arrived a fashionably 30 minutes later. Which was beginning to be a recurring theme, of which I was the recurring character.

Groundhog Day

And it got me thinking: if this is a pattern, what’s the message that is trying to get through?

Has this happened to you? It’s not exactly de ja vu. It’s more like groundhog day:

new day, same strange phenomenon.

When it happens it tends to stop me in my tracks. Like the time when glass kept shattering all around me. A bottle fell out of my fridge, a glass mason jar slipped out of my hand, someone else around me dropped glass. And because it was all in the matter of a week it felt like a strange phenomenon, as if the shattered glass was saying: you-whooooo, are you paying attention?

This felt like that. But how to make sense of it?

I am Them, They are Me

I am an expert on time and energy management, I live and die by my calendar (if it’s not on my calendar it doesn’t exist), and I have a myriad of productivity hacks for creating time abundance.

And I, too, sometimes show up late.

There is this old 80’s TV commercial for the Hair Club for Men where the founder confesses at the end: “I’m not only the Hair Club president, but I’m also a client.”

As for me and my journey to time mastery it is very accurate to say that:

I have strategies because I have struggled.

A simple confession that feels necessary in this space and equally as necessary in my inner space: I didn’t get here because I was born this way, I got here because I needed to.

Mirrors

I interpreted these back-to-back encounters with friends as mirrors, reflecting back to me something in myself.

Coffee date dude stacked his morning to try to get a lot of things done and I just got caught in the mix (collateral damage, if you will). But REAL TALK: I am the queen of stacking my morning to squeeze a lot of things in and you don’t have to look very far in my friend circle to find someone that has been on the waiting end of me stacking things a little too tightly.

My new co-working bestie had a little magical thinking about time that morning and I was just an innocent bystander. REAL TALK: magical thinking about time is the number one thing I have had to overcome in my own time journey so I know it well.

There is a famous quote by Carl Jung:

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

And I wonder if this is what he means by that. I felt frustrated in both instances, but I can see that I was meeting parts of myself in both encounters.

Maybe it will keep happening or maybe it won’t, but the message was received and now is as good time as any for a personal refresher on strategies for Magical Thinking and the Illusion of Time.

Time Magical Thinking

Time is both finite and illusive. It’s finite in that fact that there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute. It’s also illusive in that the same hour can feel like an eternity or it can pass in a flash and feel like no time as passed at all.

This is where magical thinking creeps in. We convince ourselves that somehow we can bend time to our will: "I can definitely fit in a quick workout, shower, make breakfast, answer those three emails, AND make it across town by 9am."

Sound familiar?

Magical thinking about time is believing we can accomplish more in a given timeframe than is actually possible. It's the optimism that says traffic will be light, every task will go smoothly, and nothing unexpected will happen.

It's not that optimism is bad—it's that unrealistic optimism sets us up for a constant battle with the clock. And that battle? It's exhausting.

Breaking the Spell: Top 5 Tips for Magical Thinkers

So how do we break free from magical thinking about time? Here are five practices that help me transform magical time thinking into magical time expansion:

1. the Reality Check: For a few days, track how long your routine tasks actually take you (versus how long you thought they would). This data helps recalibrate your time awareness around the things you do every day.

2. the Clarity Cure: If you don’t already, put absolutely everything in your calendar: appointments, travel time, prep time, and even those "quick" tasks. This will give you a visual view that can help you to see where you are over-scheduled and help you manage your own expectations for the day. NOTE: this can be especially challenging when your time is not your own, especially for work meetings and calls you don’t have a lot of autonomy over. It is still extremely helpful to have a calendar process even if you can’t control all the pieces on the calendar.

3. the Easy Button: Ease is the name of the game: how can you create more ease in your schedule? Try this: now that you know how long everything takes you, when you put it in your calendar add inflation. You will find your best inflation rate to give your schedule more ease, in the meantime you can start with 1.5 (if your commute takes you 10 minutes, you put it in your calendar for 15).

4. the Buffer Zone: Speaking of ease, give yourself some white space in your calendar in the form of 10-15 minutes between appointments and calls to the extent possible.

5. the Preparation Hack: When you see your schedule all laid out and it looks tight, see what you can prepare the day before to add more ease to your flow. Setting out clothes, setting up the coffee maker, anything that would help you eliminate the "just one more thing" syndrome that often makes us late.

The Real Magic

I have to remind myself time and again that life isn't about squeezing more into each day, that by being honest about what fits I can get clear about what’s important, and the best planned day leaves a little space for magic, syncronicities and the delightfully unexpected.

And all of this just acts as a precursor to the best kind of magic—getting into flow state. That elusive zone where time seems to expand, you are in your zone of genius, and you feel fully alive in the moment.

I’ll be sharing more about this state of time abundance and creative power in future posts, in the meantime I’ll say this: flow state might just be the ultimate antidote to time scarcity.

The Rest of the Story

I’m leaving out the nitty gritty details that added to my frustation in the stories above, mostly because they aren’t that important and I truly wish I was the kind of person who could be easy-breezy in these scenarios. Still, I feel obligated to tell you the rest of the story.

Coffee-date-dude ultimately wasn't an aligned relationship for me. Some patterns are meant to be broken, not repeated.

Coffee-shop-work-bestie and I tried again, on another week at a different coffee shop and I reset my own expectations for what it looks like to co-work together. Simultaneous arrival wasn’t nearly as important as crossing paths while we were out working in the wild. Sometimes the pattern doesn't need to change—just our relationship to it.

And I’ll be doubling down on the top 5 tips I listed just to clean up my side of the street when it comes to time in the meantime.

Your Turn

What's your favorite form of magical thinking about time? Is it the belief that you can squeeze in "just one more thing" before leaving? Or perhaps it's underestimating how long your commute really takes?

Identify your most common time illusion this week, and experiment with one of the practices above. Then notice what happens when you replace magical thinking with time expansion.

Because the real magic isn't in manipulating time—it's in making peace with it.

Share your favorite time illusion in the comments below, or reach out if you're ready to transform your relationship with time from struggle to flow.