"There's No Time" [The Write Way, part 1]

Based on "Mastering The Mind"

In this series, The Write Way, we are featuring writing from Bnei Torah in the workforce. With Parshas HaChodesh approaching, our first post will be about time management. This essay is based on a section of the book Mastering The Mind by Saul Clarke. Saul is a risk analyst who recently made Aliyah from the UK to Ramot. His book was described by Rav Gil Student as “The Kol Bo of [mind control] methods. He synthesizes current research with Chazal and puts forward a bunch of different methods anyone can incorporate in their life, some easy and some more difficult.”

Time Management

Discussions around the concept of time can often wind down an intellectual path, without considering its impacts on our everyday lives. In reality, our relationship with time determines to a large extent, our movement towards success in all of our pursuits. The same can certainly be said in the realm of our success in learning. When push comes to shove, a person cannot attain genuine mastery of areas in Torah without the ability to appreciate the value of our most precious resource: time.

The Mishnah in Avos says: “Rabbi Tarfon said, ‘The day is short, and the work is plenty, and the laborers are lazy, and the reward is great, and the Master of the House is insistent.’”^[1]

Another source in Chazal that speaks about the finite capacity of time is a pasuk in Mishlei: “For we are of yesterday and know nothing; Our days on earth are a shadow.”^[2] The pasuk draws a comparison between the notion of time and a shadow, which is elusive and fleeting. Like a shadow, we can chase it down, but it doesn’t stop. It’s unsurmountable and unattainable. We try to grab it, contain it, and seek mastery over it, but we fail miserably. How many of us dream of the day we have checked off the last item on our ever-growing to-do list, cleared every email, and pursued all our dreams, side projects, hobbies, desires, and important priorities. Maybe, one day, we will have defeated that devil called time and will finally breathe a sigh of relief to have loads of time on our hands. Sadly, this will never happen. We won’t win. Time will have the last word. And deep down, we know it.

Life is Short

Ultimately, we have a finite amount of time in which to fit an almost infinite set of important things we wish to do. Does this mean we give up completely and let time walk all over us without putting up somewhat of a fight? Of course not. What it does mean, though, is that we must acknowledge that many things in life won’t and can’t get done. Life’s stubborn reality means that, in effect, we live with an imaginary clock hanging over our heads, ticking and tocking relentlessly until it runs out of power. It’s a scary and almost depressing idea, and it does create a certain amount of pressure on our shoulders. But we need this pressure. And it can be used to drive us forward.

The Mishnah in Avos famously tells us that reflecting on this clock, on our finitude in this world, on where we are heading to when time runs out, enables us to live the life we want to live.^[3] It’s pressure. But it’s also empowering and provides a focus on how we spend our precious time. It forces us to be more selective about where we go, what we do, what we allow to consume us, and what we make of each of the 1,440 minutes that we face every single day. As Frank Ostaseki says in his work, What Death Can Teach Us about Living Fully:

Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight. She helps us to discover what matters most. And the good news is we don’t have to wait till the end of our lives to realize the wisdom that death has to offer.^[4]

The First Mitzvah

It’s interesting that the very first mitzvah following our slavery in Egypt was “Ha’chodesh ha’zeh lachem,”^[5] the quintessential mitzvah regarding taking control of time. The Jewish people had spent hundreds of years as slaves, which by definition means they had no control over their use of time and no appreciation of what it meant to decide what to do and when. Just before they were granted freedom, Hashem felt it was important that one of the first lessons they learned was that life was going to be different from now on. The Seforno explains that the mitzvah of ha’chodesh ha’zeh was this very point.^[6] From now on, the months would be ours to do with as we please; we would no longer be working on someone else’s schedule. Being free meant we would now have the autonomy to decide what to focus our time on.

Reflecting on this in our own lives and realizing that we own our time can be a liberating exercise. It’s in each of our destiny and it’s our responsibility to set up our own time management system for getting things done in our life.

Time for Torah

When it comes to the specific mitzvah of learning Torah, one of the most fundamental challenges we face is the way in which we interact with time. Our Sages teach that the second question God will place before us after our sojourn on earth is whether we “set aside time for Torah study.”^[7] It’s revealing that the question is not framed by whether we learned, how much we learned, what type of learning we did, whether or not we transmitted that learning to our children or others, or how much of the learning we actually retained. It’s simply a question to determine whether we incorporated a time management strategy into our learning. It’s a powerful message about the importance placed on the process, over and above the outcomes. Knowledge is important, but we all have varying abilities and access to that knowledge. More important, therefore, are the measures we take to make learning a key focus. This includes, for example, blocking off time in our day, maximizing the time available, being efficient in other tasks to make additional time available, and so on. Rituals and habits are the best way to create an arsenal of routines to help us succeed.

No Excuses

The final source we will bring is from the words of Chazal is a fascinating Gemara in Yoma: “Our Rabbis taught: The poor, the rich, and the wicked come to judgment. To the poor we say, ‘Why did you not engage in Torah?’ If the poor one says, ‘l was engrossed in making a living,’ we say to him, ‘Were you poorer than Hillel?’”^[8] The Gemara then tells over the story about Hillel and his tremendous dedication to learning. Even in a state of such absolute poverty that he was refused entry to the beis midrash, Hillel was so determined to hear Torah from Shemayah and Avtalyon that he climbed on to the roof of the beis midrash and listened in while the snow fell down upon him.

A similar discussion is held with the rich and the rasha. If the rich claim that managing their wealth was so time-consuming that it left no time for Torah study, they are asked, “Were you of greater wealth than Rabbi Elazar ben Charsom, whose father left him a thousand cities on the land and a thousand boats at sea, and each and every day he would take a sack of flour on his shoulder and travel from city to city and country to country to study Torah?”

It then concludes with the rasha. If he claims he was so distracted and faced so many temptations that he was unable to learn, we say to him, “Were you more beautiful than Yosef? The Gemara goes on to detail the persistent and tempting advances of Potiphar’s wife, and Yosef’s ongoing resistance. The Gemara concludes, “We find that Hillel obligates the poor, Rabbi Elazar ben Charsom obligates the wealthy, and Yosef obligates the wicked.”

The above is an enlightening piece of Aggadeta and in essence gives us the message that we can’t make excuses for a lack of time.^[9] We have to prioritize learning. Hillel, Rabbi Elazar ben Charsom, and Yosef didn’t make excuses that they were too busy or too distracted. And we also shouldn’t. They understood that time is more important than anything, no matter how precarious their situation. It’s our most valued commodity. On any given day, we have as much of it as the wealthy guy and the poor guy. We shouldn’t trade it for more money or more pleasure. If we care about Torah, then we will sacrifice spare moments to immerse in it. This is what life is about. As Stephen Vincent Benet says, “Life is not lost by dying; Life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand, small, uncaring ways.”^[10]

With all the will in the world, we won’t be able to master Torah if we don’t have specific strategies for negotiating time. Today, more than ever, we can fall into the trap of telling ourselves that we just don’t have the time to devote to memory systems, chazarah hacks, note-taking routines, and meditation techniques to enhance the learning process. Work, family, community, leisure time, and even shiurim and learning schedules can get in the way of thinking we have space to commit to doing the real hard work to gain mastery. We wish we had time to know our learning better, but we just don’t.

Conclusion

Some people might feel that time management approaches to life would drive them insane. If the goal of every moment is to be productive, it will end up backfiring and you will lose the verve and passion to pursue your goals. So, it’s critical to be aware of your emotions and how this type of existence is impacting your overall well-being. It’s also worth noting that it’s legitimate and even recommended that the time you save and the gap you’re looking to utilize be used for things like: doing nothing, playing games, relaxing, scrolling through your phone. It’s not procrastination if it’s deliberate. Time enjoyed wasted is not the same as wasted time. The difference is that it’s planned, and you feel it’s needed.

I’ll end this essay by reinforcing the idea I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. Life is short. But we also can’t be paralyzed by all the things we are trying to do. Instead, we must constantly strive to harmonize urgency with a sense of calm and purpose. As Oliver Burkeman says:

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible — the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.^[11]

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^[1] Avos 2:15.

^[2] Mishlei 8:9.

^[3] Avos 3:1.

^[4] F. Ostaseski, The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us about Living Fully (Flatiron Books, 2017).

^[5] Shemos 10:10.

^[6] Ibid., 12:2.

^[7] Shabbos 31a.

^[8] Yoma 35b.

^[9] See Ben Yehoyada to Yoma 35b.

^[10] M. Living, “The Clock(s) Are Ticking,” The Good Men Project, January 5, 2023, https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-clock-s-are-ticking-kpkn/.

^[11] O. Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).