At the root of so much of our anxiety as creators is our relationship with time.

So often, we feel constrained, even oppressed by our perceived lack of time in relation to the scope of goals we want to achieve.

As a result, we end up heaping pressure on ourselves to work more, faster, harder, optimizing every minute of every day in order to keep up with the competition and maintain the blistering schedule we’ve set for ourselves.

Apart from not being conducive to leading a happy, fulfilling life, this relationship with time also keeps us from creating the quality and depth of work we’re truly capable of.

But what if all our ideas around the limited amount of time we have to get ahead and make an impact weren’t just unhelpful, but flat out wrong? Backward even?

What if instead of viewing time as a restrictive enemy to fight against, we could view it as a benevolent ally to work with?

Said differently, what would it take to feel that time was actually on our side?

I know it sounds radical, given our bias towards scarcity thinking. But the reframe is simpler than you might think.

At it’s core, it comes down to addressing two mindset issues that are both within our control to change: Misaligned expectations and the comparison game.

Recalibrating Our Expectations Around Time

We most commonly think about our relationship with time in the urgent context of our day-to-day lives.

The topic of time calls to mind tasks and projects with pressing due dates, appointments and events to rush to, and meetings slotted into our schedules like Tetris pieces.

From this short-term perspective, it’s hard to view time as anything but an onerous constraint. At best to be negotiated with and worked within, at worst to be pushed against and fought with.

As we shift our perspective from the short to long-term view, however, we begin to see time from a different perspective. Not as a narrow constraint, but as an open expanse, full of opportunity and possibility.

Sure, our calendars are overbooked now, but look even just a month or two into the future, let alone a year or two, and a blank canvas presents itself, ready and waiting for us to pick up the brush and start to paint.

Our challenge then, is to be mindful of both views of time, the narrow and the expansive, and shape our experience of each of them intentionally.

This intentional crafting of our schedule requires an awareness of two categories of tasks and projects.

Conduits & Blockades

First, we need to recognize the tasks and projects that–while important (maybe even essential) to our long term creative success–routinely get pushed off in favour of more urgent short term tasks.

I like to think of these projects as Conduits as a reminder to myself that these are the things that will move me closer to my creative potential.

For time to work in our favour, Conduits require us to actively schedule them into our calendars and protect their space fiercely.

As you’re likely aware, however, Conduits are difficult to keep clear.

The reason, is Blockades.

Blockades are the urgent-feeling types of tasks, projects, and requests of our time that routinely infringe on, eat away at, block out entirely our Conduits.

Blockades are closely tied to our feeling of time scarcity, and while we might think of them as specific requests of our time (meetings and emails come immediately to mind), what makes a task, project or deadline a Blockade is not the task itself, but our response to it.

Many potential Blockades are made up of tasks that are necessary to running and progressing our creative businesses.

What’s not necessary, however, is our tendency to automatically insert them in the path of our Conduits.

In most cases, that meeting request could be scheduled for next week, or the week after, or a month from now rather than squarely in the middle of the one two hour block of time you have available tomorrow.

Similarly, most client projects could easily have an extra two weeks added on to the scope without any pushback.

If we want time to work for us, rather than against us, we need to take a more active role in shaping how our time is used.

In some ways, taking active control over the time we have available to us is the easy part.

It’s cause and effect. We take an action and see a result.

The murkier, more difficult side of making time our ally is avoiding the pull of being influenced by how those around us are using their time and trusting our own processes and intuition.

How The Comparison Game Influences Your Relationship With Time

It’s difficult enough to maintain control of our relationship with time in a vacuum.

It’s almost impossible to keep up the discipline, however, with every one of our competitor’s websites and social media accounts never more than three seconds away.

While checking in on our competitor’s latest case study, big client achievement or social media post might be the most anxiety-inducing variety, the comparison game extends beyond our direct competitors.

Chance’s are, we’re surrounded by collaborators, accountability partners, and a network of other creators and business owners doing similar work to ours. Maybe they’ve just run an amazing 5-day challenge, maybe they’re gaining traction on TikTok, or maybe the YouTube channel they started 6 months ago just hit 100k subscribers.

We don’t have to look far to find someone already achieving the results we’ve dreamed of for ourselves… probably in less time.

When we see someone else achieving our goals, our time-anxiety is triggered, prompting us to tear up our new, more spacious, long-term focused schedule and fill it up with short-term, shiny object, hustle-focused work in an attempt to replicate the success of someone else.

The irony is that the people we compare ourselves to (and even compete with) are rarely working towards the same end goals we are. What’s more, they’re working with different skills, experiences, values, and perspectives.

Is it any wonder then that we rarely get the same results when trying to emulate someone else’s results?

Eliminating the Negative Influence of Competition & Comparison

When it comes to removing the potential source of such a trigger, the most obvious option is to limit our time on social media, unfollow negative influences, and make a rule to never, EVER go down the rabbit hole of poring over our competitor’s accounts.

All of these are likely healthy choices.

But when it comes to creating a relationship with time where we truly feel that it’s on our side, working for us instead of against us, avoidance is simply a bandaid solution.

We can do better than that.

In my experience, when we feel the pressure to keep up with the Joneses, it’s because we’re working towards similar–if not identical–goals.

But much like our view of time shifts from enemy to ally as we move our perspective from the short to the long term view, our view of goals, milestones, and competition does as well.

Reframing Your Relationship With Competition

In the short term, we’re most often working toward crystal clear, hard and fast goals.

Landing a certain number of new clients, hitting a specific revenue target, enrolling a target number of students for our course, increasing our traffic or follower or subscriber counts are all common milestones we might be working towards.

These goals, while clear and easily measured are also–for those very same reasons–ripe for comparison to–if not in direct competition with–others.

Maybe it’s the zero-sum competition of vying over the same client, a general competition for attention, or simply the urge to measure and judge our progress (if not outright worth) against others operating in entirely different niches.

The problem is that in focusing primarily on these goals and metrics it’s easy to step onto the hedonic treadmill and become hooked. Before long, chasing ever larger numbers becomes our goal in and of itself.

Without stopping to ask what it’s all for, we can become consumed by the competition and the chase.

Our perspective shifts, however, as we take a longer view of things.

Competition Ceases To Exist In The Long Run

When we zoom out to the long view, specific metrics and milestones recede into the background or disappear entirely.

With them, so does the idea of competition & comparison.

It’s impossible to say who we would feel pressure to compete or keep up with 10, 20, or 30 years from now, and have no baseline from which to set any measurable goals.

If you’re like me, zooming out might spark the realization that 20 years from now, your goal is to have worked yourself to a place that is naturally without competition. That you’ll have developed your voice, perspective, and your work to a place where it is entirely singular.

That’s not to say everyone will want or like your work, most people won’t. But for the people who do, you’ll be the only one they can get it from.

While developing a singular voice over a time-span of multiple decades is certainly not as easy a goal to work towards as getting 10K Instagram subscribers, it’s a much more valuable one.

Perhaps most importantly, it establishes your magnetic North, the point from which all of your interim goals, projects, and actions are referenced and working towards.

Competition & Comparison Are Matters Of Perspective

Beyond giving you a valuable reference point for your short term actions, clarity around the type of work and life you’re working toward can also radically reframe your relationship with time, as well as the creators around you, even your direct competitors.

Take the following charts of the trajectories of both us, and the creators around us.

When we zoom in to the shortest-term view, the space feels impossibly crowded, as though everyone is jostling against each other, competing for the same limited resources and attention.

Zoom out, however, and we can see that given enough time, each of us is moving towards a space in which we’re the only occupant, the creator of singular work that can’t be found anywhere else.

Viewed this way, our perception of both time and competition shift.

It becomes clear that given enough time, (as long as we’re not actively copying someone else) if we stick to our process, it’s entirely inevitable that we’ll end up in a space that we can own for ourselves.

Once again, the further we look ahead, the more time appears a welcoming expanse to lean into, rather than a constraint to be pushed back against.

And while you might not be able to simply quit the short term jostling and jump into creating singular work, you can certainly accelerate your progress.

Sprint To The Open Space

The first step is to choose to opt-out of short-term competitions defined as important by other people without clarity on exactly how they serve your long-term vision.

Gaining followers might feel both urgent and important now, but how do those followers fit into your 20-year vision?

Second, remember that the thing that creates singular work is a unique perspective and voice.

While this can’t be developed overnight, there are a couple of things you can do on a regular basis over the short-term to get there.

1. Diversify Your Inputs

It’s hard to develop a unique voice and perspective when you’re consuming all the same base material as everyone else around you.

Push yourself to seek out information and inspiration from a diversity of sources. Find business and creative inspiration from non-business or creative sources. Watch foreign movies, read fiction and literature, follow your curiosity instead of top-10 lists and recommendations from others.

When you have a specific skill or tool you need to learn quickly, binge deeply on that and return to your habit of broad content consumption.

Then, get creating.

2. Create, Publish, Repeat

The chart above applies equally to your voice. At the start, you’re going to sound a lot like everyone else, making you a commodity, one among many competing for the same attention.

You want to get out of this zone as quickly as possible, and the fastest way to do that is to create. A lot.

Work the generic content out of your system by publishing consistently.

Good or bad doesn’t apply right now, most of it will almost certainly be bad, at least compared to what you’ll be creating a year from now, or five or ten or twenty years from now.

Again, we see how, with a solid process in place, time is in fact on our side, our work improving, and our voice and perspective becoming more unique with the passage of time.

You Control Your Experience Of Time & Scarcity

While not easy, we each have the ability to recalibrate our relationship with time – from viewing it as an enemy and constraint to being our greatest ally and opportunity.

While we don’t need (and can’t possibly) have a crystal-clear picture of where we want to be decades from now, it helps to regularly zoom out and think in longer time frames than we’re accustomed to.

Starting from a long-term perspective, we’re able to adopt short term strategies that align our goals, actions, and even day to day scheduling with our defined magnetic North.

And while keeping your compass needle pointed in the right direction is certainly valuable, so is the impact this type of long-term-first thinking has on your day to day experience.

Less stress, less scarcity, more space, and the comfort of knowing that you’re walking a path in which, as long as you keep putting one foot in front of the either, time is on your side.

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