The clock, the calendar, the days of the week—it’s easy to forget that these are all human inventions. It’s also very hard to imagine a world without them, which is clearly why they were invented and why they’ve served the world so well. It certainly makes it easier to make an appointment to meet up for coffee in two weeks.
In many lines of work, we’re facing an epidemic of burnout, so perhaps it is an opportune time to consider how we view time—both our own time and how time works in general. It’s a topic that’s been on people’s minds. When the COVID 19 pandemic called a halt to many of our regular routines, we started to treat our time differently: baking a loaf of sourdough bread in the time it took to have a Zoom meeting. While some people found leisure, though, others—most significantly, many people working in health care and in other essential jobs that cannot be done at home while waiting for your air fryer to cook dinner—found increased pressure. These folks are facing—or have succumbed to—burnout while others returning to work from the WFH (Working From Home) world are having trouble…
