Three Ways I Practice Time

People ask me what I do and I say: I work with time.

No, not productivity. Not time management either. Not how to squeeze more from your morning or batch your Tuesdays. I work with time the way a gardener works with soil: as a living medium that shapes everything it touches and is shaped by how we meet it.

I’ve spent thirteen years studying humanity’s relationship with time. Across Indigenous knowledge systems in the Amazon, Afro-diasporic cosmologies, philosophy, organizational strategy, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. Across homes in 10+ countries. Across collaborations with organizations like Google and Spotify, with institutions like the United Nations, Unesco, and also governments, and universities.

What I’ve found, again and again, is that our deepest crises – burnout, ecological collapse, the loneliness epidemic, the way AI is accelerating everything without asking whether acceleration is what we need – are not problems of resources or information. They are problems of time. Of how we relate to it. Of what we’ve been taught to do with it. Of what we’ve forgotten it can be.

I approach this through three lenses. They are not theories. They are practices. Ways I try to live, not just things I teach.

Witnessing Time

I grew up in Belém do Pará, surrounded by Amazon Rainforest rivers, where the rain announces itself minutes before it arrives and the river doesn’t care what your deadline is. That taught me something early that took me decades to understand: the most important things are not produced. They are witnessed.

For a long time, I resisted this. I wanted to be useful. I built myself into a changemaker identity: always producing, always facilitating, always making something happen for someone. And that is real work, and I don’t regret it. But there was a pressure inside that identity that almost ate me: the belief that my value depended on my output. That if I wasn’t changing something, I wasn’t enough.

Life taught me otherwise. Or more precisely: life kept teaching me, and I kept not listening, until I had no choice.

What I eventually learned (from the Tao Te Ching, from Umbanda, from sitting with Indigenous elders who could hold four hours of silence without calling it unproductive) is that there is a kind of attention that is not passive. The Taoists call it wu wei: not doing nothing, but not forcing. Moving with what is already moving. Finding the path of least effort. Not because you are lazy, but because you have learned to read which doors are actually open.

Witnessing Time is the practice of observing what is emerging before you intervene. It is trusting that not every moment requires your action. It is learning to distinguish between the discomfort of genuine stagnation and the discomfort of a seed that hasn’t broken soil yet.

Most of us were never taught this. We were taught that if something isn’t happening, we should make it happen. Witnessing Time says: sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is notice what is already trying to happen and get out of its way.

Making Time

My African ancestors – the ones who crossed the Atlantic not by choice, who rebuilt entire cosmologies on foreign soil with almost nothing – carried a knowledge that I am still learning to receive. Among many things, they understood that time is not only something you spend. It is something you can create.

This sounds impossible inside a Western industrial framework, where time is a fixed resource: twenty-four hours, no more, no less, and your only job is to allocate them efficiently. But I have experienced, again and again, that certain qualities of attention, certain kinds of presence, certain rituals and rhythms can make one hour hold what ten scattered hours cannot.

You have experienced this too. A conversation that lasted forty minutes and changed your life. An afternoon where everything you needed to do simply flowed, and at the end of it you wondered where the ease came from. A ceremony, a dance, a meal with people you love, where clock-time became irrelevant because you were inside a different kind of time altogether.

Making Time is the practice of cultivating the conditions under which time expands. It is definitely not a hack of optimization. It is an orientation toward depth over speed, toward presence over productivity, toward the understanding that how you enter an hour matters more than how many tasks you fit inside it.

When I say “one hour becomes enough for everything necessary,” I don’t mean you will get your entire to-do list done. I mean something more radical: that when you are fully in the hour, your sense of what is necessary changes. The list gets shorter. Not because you gave up, but because you got honest.

Liberating Time

I have lived in many countries. I was in 10 only last year. I have worked as a consultant, a researcher, a facilitator, a professor, a speaker, and most consistently as someone who refuses to believe that the way we currently organize work and rest is the only way available to us.

Liberating Time operates at two scales, always.

At the personal scale, it is the ongoing, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes joyful work of freeing my own time from structures that don’t serve me. Choosing not to answer the email at eleven at night. Choosing to write in the morning before doing anything that makes money. Choosing to live without a fixed office, or in a city where I can walk to the sea. These are beyond luxuries. They are the best temporal negotiations someone can do. My small acts of sovereignty over how my hours are shaped.

But liberation that stays individual is incomplete.

At the collective scale, Liberating Time means questioning the structures themselves. Why does a standard workweek look the way it does? Whose temporality does a 9-to-5 actually serve? What happens when we design organizations around cyclical rhythms rather than perpetual acceleration? What would it mean for a society to take rest as seriously as it takes growth? Will current technologies liberate us from time or make it disappear?

These are not rhetorical questions for me. They are research questions. I’ve spent years working independently and collaborating with organizations on exactly this: on not just reimagining their strategies, but reimagining their temporal architectures. How they structure time. Whose rhythms they center. What they make room for and what they squeeze out.

Liberating Time is the recognition that your relationship with time is not only personal. It is political. The way time is organized in a society reflects who has power and who doesn’t. Whose pace is considered normal. Whose rhythms are pathologized. Whose rest is treated as laziness and whose busyness is treated as virtue.

I don’t have a manifesto for how to fix this. I have practices, questions, frameworks, case studies, and thirteen years of living the inquiry. What I know is that liberation starts with awareness: noticing the temporal structures you live inside, and then (slowly, deliberately, sometimes fiercely) choosing which ones to keep and which ones to dismantle.

Where these lenses meet

Witnessing, Making, Liberating. They are not stages tho. You don’t graduate from one to the next. They coexist. Three qualities of attention you can bring to any moment, any project, any relationship, any crisis.

Some seasons ask you to witness. To wait. To listen for what is trying to emerge. Some seasons ask you to make. To produce time through depth, ritual, and presence. Some seasons ask you to liberate. To question the structure. To change the design. To refuse.

And some seasons, the most alive ones, ask you to do all three at once.

This is what I teach. This is what I practice. This is what my work, my method, and the thirteen years behind them are all about.

Everything is temporal. And how you meet time changes everything.

→ Explore the possibilities of your own Temporal Compass sessions with me.