The Changing Times

Reading Time: 5 minutes

It is a new year according to people who follow the Gregorian tradition. Increasingly, I have neglected or ignored the change from December 31 to January 1. It may be age as much as anything—I am like the 40% of Americans who will go to bed before the clock strikes 12—but I also feel that my outlook on time has shifted over the years. I am much more likely to think of time passing according to goals or projects and less by the calendar itself.

It wasn’t really something I thought about much until one of our kids started to learn Farsi and we dug into Nowruz. Lunar new year was also a bit on my radar but only in a very general sense. I had no idea about the many other new year traditions, as well as those who still observe Old New Year. It was learning about the coincidence of Nowruz with the spring equinox that really shifted my feelings about new year’s day.

This may be in part because the Gregorian new year’s day was always something of a second holiday for our family. Things wrapped up on Epiphany, when the tree had to come down, and the base was sawn off as a yule log for next year. But it was all merged into a long break from school and work and was the most significant reinforcement of the traditions our family had brought with us.

But the times change and traditions modify or fall away.

O Tempora O Mores

Time is a slippery thing. It can become, and be used as, a stress-inducing constraint on how we live our lives. This is particularly true in the workplace, where time is sometimes a replacement for value. How many meetings you attend or how long a day you work can become a focus. An employer can measure those things more easily than they can value. An employee can also compare themselves with their own goals, if not their colleagues as well, to confirm their own self-image as a hard worker.

But time isn’t a measure of value and the temporal check-in has faded as a value for me too. I appreciated this perspective on why a new year’s day was important. As a researcher in the article points out, people look for a moment to take stock and get a fresh start.

I think the thing that I no longer perceive as relevant is the year as a measurement. It’s arbitrary. It’s a bit like the annual performance review. A manager should be providing feedback all the time, not just on an annualized (or annual segment, like quarterly) basis. The yearly orientation creates an arbitrary cycle that may or may not fit into how we live our lives or perform our work.

When I was working in Canada, we did our performance reviews at fiscal year end. I think that’s pretty normal, give or take. It causes compensation to be conflated with performance, though. The review becomes the benchmark for how much, if any, someone’s financial compensation will increase. I have heard human resources (led by the “head of people”) specialists try to emphasize that the two should not be conflated, but when they occur contemporaneously, it seems natural that people connect them.

What has been fascinating for me to watch is the coverage of law firm bonuses. I’m glad that the relationship between hours worked and bonus tier is so clearly delineated. Don’t get me wrong, I think large law firms can be terribly unhealthy places to work and professional ethics at some of the largest have been called into question in the last 12 months—and what does it say about the profession that this is an explicit comparison point between firms—but at least the connection, however corrosive, is visible. Of course, this is not all law firms although I dare say many tie compensation to hours billed in lieu of a value measure.

Additionally, I have started to perceive my own life without those temporal markers. I’m not sure when this started to occur but I think it is when I started to measure projects or life goals that extended out beyond one or two years. A new year doesn’t have any impact when you are in the middle of something that extends longer than 12 months: my brother’s detention by the Russian government was nearly 6 years, my own journey to become an American citizen has already taken 6 and has a few more to go, and so on.

Operationally, the 12-month cycle means that we take projects that extend beyond that and chop them into pieces. This is, in part, due to the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of so much of our funding. When you operate on a fiscal year, you may not be able to commit to future expenses that occur beyond the 12-month period you are currently in. Conversely, once an organization has budgeted, it may be difficult to change direction within that annual cycle because of prior resource allocation.

This can mean committing to a phased approach where “what we can accomplish in 12 months” becomes a guiding principle. Instead of that being a sub-part of a completed objective, it becomes the objective itself, just in case resources disappear at the end of the 12-month cycle.

Out of Time

I woke up on January 1 the same as I had on December 31. For me there was no temporal check-in. Not surprisingly, I don’t have any resolutions for the new year except to keep on keeping on. The goals are the same until they are achieved or until I need to adapt a goal or drop it due to lack of resources.

Even before my own epiphany about the annual cycle, I had lost regard for new year’s resolutions. There is so much guidance available to help people who make them successfully complete them. The thing I took away from the advice is that they need to be specific and achievable. The specificity doesn’t require a twelvemonth, though: it can be any increment of time or it can be without a time measurement.

I think this is what calls out to me. So much of what we do does not need to be measured in time. Sure, we are answering questions and those have deadlines and so forth. But when we are thinking about larger goals or changes in our lives (whether personal athleticism or health or things related to our work), there is no need to set a deadline on an outcome. That approach feels to me like requiring people to do a 40-hour work week or three days in the office to reach a measurement of value.

What happens when you achieve your goal early? What happens if you achieve your goal later than your deadline?

Some people want or value that annual culmination. I completely understand. Sometimes life becomes so overwhelming that it may be the only time you take stock and think about what’s ahead. I would wish for everyone that they have the opportunity to do that more often.

My own experience suggests that it can be very hard to know how long it will take to reach a goal. My permanent resident card took nearly 18 months to arrive, far longer than I (or the governance board that had offered me a job) thought it would. I’m hoping that my citizenship will go forward smoothly but these days, who knows? As I say to our kids frequently: it takes the time it takes. I have been glad to see them adopt this mindset and the resultant reduction in anxiously worrying about time. You can’t rush a 10-minute egg.

In fact, if there is a specific deadline, you may end up having to tailor what is possible to the time, rather than designing for what is desirable. If my goal is to lose weight, I should work towards that specific target. If my goal is to run a 5K, then that should be the goal, not to do it by a deadline. We do not know what the future holds for us, but we can use the time we are given to do our best to work towards a goal.

There is a school of thought that things won’t happen without a deadline. I’m not so sure. A deadline may cause someone to prioritized resources but I don’t think it’s dispositive of whether something will come to pass or not. Strategic planning for five years or annual goal setting fall into this basket for me. Too much structure over too long a period of time that may not allow for adapting to uncertainty and change. Conversely, they can be made so adaptable as to lose the value of having a plan or goals.

I do wonder if some part of the new year’s focus on pulse taking is that we do not make enough time elseways to be contemplative. As someone who has led organizational teams, it is a natural reflex to look at what people are doing and ask (myself or them) why? Change should not happen on a schedule, it should happen when change is due. We may miss opportunities to make healthy changes—like cancelling an under utilized subscription—then find ourselves, at temporal crossroads, being forced to cut or cancel without the opportunity for reflection.

If you celebrate a new year in the next 12 months, may it be a happy one for you. I hope you will have time to stop and think often about what you want to accomplish, what you value, and how those coincide. No matter how long it takes, I hope you find success.