Clock Time vs. Earth Time: Rethinking How We Work

“Learning involves patience and time.” www.fnesc.ca

When was the last time you looked at the clock in your workday. What surfaced in your nervous system? What was your initial response to the hands or numbers on the clock? Was it “UGH, I’m behind” or “I’m never going to get caught up”?

Not having enough time is something I hear from people who work in both healthcare and educational settings. It is like a necessary, but missing ingredient to a beloved family recipe. Yet perhaps that special recipe emerged out of not having enough of a particular item in the pantry. This sense of losing time might speak to a more Westernized view that time is linear and measured numerically, like a clock. Moreover, once that time has passed, it can’t be retrieved.

In contrast, Indigenous peoples’ view of time is cyclical and rooted in natural rhythms, like the seasons. “For Indigenous peoples across the vast expanse of North America, time is rarely a straight line; it is a dynamic, living entity, intricately woven into the fabric of the natural world, the community, and the spiritual realm.” Indigenous cultures organize life around cycles and rhythms in nature. This concept of “earth time” is more about asking “Where are we?” rather than “What time is it?”

If you work in healthcare or education, your day is generally organized by the clock. Patients are scheduled to see providers in time slots throughout the day, and educators are working with students in segments of the school day often marked by the signal of a bell or chime. These structures, while necessary to shuttle people daily through a system, determine much about how the people in the workplace environment move throughout the day. For example, statements of urgency like “We don’t have time for that” or “We need to move on” say much about the value of time in work and systems. Peter Senge, author of the Fifth Discipline and systems thinker, writes “Every organization is a product of how its members think and interact.” How people think about time is part of the mental model in the system, in other words, the attitudes, perceptions, or assumptions people hold in the system. When mental models, like those about time, are talked about and reflected upon, the more willing and open people are to change. Perhaps, not having enough of something might turn into a new “recipe” for your system.

As you think about your own mental models for time, earth time or clock time, which one guides your daily work? How might being an observer of people navigating time in the workday inform your perceptions about time in your system?