Having No Time of Your Own Arises From the Asymmetry of the Obligation to Respond

A day ends. Only the sense of having left something undone remains, and what was left undone cannot be stated. The day went as planned, and it feels as though the one moving it was not you. Time opens up on a day off, and no use for that time comes to mind.

The own in no time of my own points at ownership, not quantity. Whose judgement decides the use of that time — that alone is the content of the word. So increasing the residue does not help: while the use is still being decided outside, the increase does not become time of your own either.

Faced with hours that have opened up, nothing comes out about what to put in them. That experience tends to be read as a matter of motivation. Yet if the work of deciding a use has not been done for a long time, nothing coming to mind is the expected result. The candidates that come to mind are drawn only from the range attention has been directed at.

So the moves against this state divide in two. Moves that increase the time, and moves that increase the right to decide its use. They are different things, and they do not advance together. While one is being worked on, the other stays where it was. And which one is being worked on is hard to tell even from the inside: both take the same shape of doing something about time.

The responses on offer — set priorities, decline, place a slot on the calendar — all genuinely work. They have a condition, though, that comes first. Play the same moves without the condition and what remains is only the fact of not having executed them. And that fact is filed not as a record of the condition but as a record of the person.

There is a reason on the side of measurement, too, for why this state runs long. The residue can be counted; who decided the use cannot. What remains at the end of a day is the memory of how many hours opened up, not of who decided the use of those hours. What is not measured goes unnoticed whether it rises or falls.

One thing is set aside in advance. The state where the absolute quantity of time is short. If sleep is being cut into, that has to be recovered first. The matter of ownership carries meaning only after that.

What follows checks what this phrase actually points at and counts where the right to decide comes from, out of the composition of the income. After that it goes as far as a third axis — attention not returning even when time does — and sets out the order between quantity and ownership. No required number of hours appears.

What Happens When “Time of Your Own” Is Defined as the Time That Remains

This phrase is sometimes defined as the result of a subtraction. From a day, subtract work, subtract the household, subtract travel, subtract sleep. What remains is time of your own.

This definition has a merit: it can be measured. How many hours remain can be calculated, and whether it rose or fell is knowable. What can be measured can be managed, so it becomes an object of response.

And as long as this definition stands, the response is settled to one thing. Reduce what is subtracted and the remainder increases. Reduce the work, make the household more efficient, shorten the travel. In practice this works. The remainder increases.

Yet there are cases where the state does not change even though the remainder increased. Faced with the two hours that opened up, there is no knowing what to do. Or the two hours end up going to the continuation of work. Only here does it become clear that the subtraction definition is dropping something.

What is dropped is the right to decide the use.

Given two hours remaining, how is the use of those two hours decided? Candidates come only from among what is visible to you at that point. And what is visible has been decided by what your attention has been directed at over the preceding months.

Spend the bulk of the day responding to demands arriving from outside and attention is turned towards demands. Then, in the time that opens up too, the search that first runs is is there something I ought to respond to? If the manner of searching is the same, open time is absorbed into the same use.

This is a matter of familiarity, surely — once resting is familiar the time becomes usable. That holds up to a point. The word familiarity, however, is pointing at two different things here. One is that resistance to the act of resting falls. The other is that the work of deciding the use for yourself resumes. The former occurs with the passage of time; the latter does not occur automatically.

The subtraction definition holds in some states. Where the absolute quantity is in extreme shortfall — where sleep is being cut into, for instance — the quantity has to be recovered first. In that case the matter of ownership can wait. The matter of quantity and the matter of ownership are not one correct and the other wrong; there is an order between them.

The definition also has a by-product that is hard to shake. Left with subtraction, improvement can only be read as still not enough.

Suppose the remainder rose from two hours to three. By the definition this is improvement. The sensation, however, is unchanged. So the verdict issued is three hours is not enough, more is needed. A verdict of insufficiency can only be issued on the axis of quantity, so the next response is directed at quantity again.

This back and forth does not end in principle. As long as the right to decide the use sits outside, no amount of increase in quantity increases the time that is your own.

Five Responses Try to Draw a Boundary on the Calendar

The ones commonly named gather into roughly five.

Sort tasks by importance and urgency and set priorities. Decline work that does not require you. Review how requests are taken in. Secure time for yourself on the calendar in advance. Reduce unnecessary meetings and social obligations.

All five work. The second and third in particular touch the side this article calls ownership, because the act of declining returns the right to decide the use to your own side.

With that said, take out the premise they share. All five presuppose that the right to decide is already yours.

Setting priorities requires the authority to set them. Declining requires a state in which the relationship does not end if you decline. Securing a slot on the calendar requires a state in which others cannot write over it. Every one of them is executable if that state is already there.

And where that state is absent, the five cannot be executed. What cannot be executed tends to be recorded as not done. What could not be done structurally and what was not done as a choice have the same shape seen from outside.

Being unable to decline is, in the end, simply not declining. In form, that can be said. Declining is physically possible. The question is whether the result of declining can be carried.

Put it as a scene. Suppose a request with a short deadline arrives from a client accounting for forty per cent of revenue. Declining is possible. If you decline, that trade may shrink. If there is no means of filling what shrinks, income falls. The reason it was not declined here is not a matter of will. It is a matter of the fact that no means of filling exists.

That is, the technique of declining does not create the right to decide. It only makes an existing right easier to use. And whether the right exists is decided by the composition of the income — how far it depends on a single counterparty.

There are cases of being unable to decline where the dependence is thin. In that case it genuinely is a matter of technique or habit. Telling them apart is simple: look at whether income would move much if that trade were lost. If it would not, it is a matter of technique; if it would, it is a matter of structure.

The responses have something that tells in reverse, too. When a slot secured on the calendar is broken, that experience is converted into self-assessment.

Suppose an hour in the morning is secured as time of your own and is broken within three days. Outwardly this is a plan was not kept. The way it is read, however, becomes I cannot keep what I decide.

This substitution occurs because on the calendar one slot looks equal to another. The hour in the morning and a meeting that came in from outside are rectangles of the same size on the screen. In fact one carries an obligation to respond and the other does not, and that difference is not displayed.

And once assessments of having failed to keep it accumulate, placing a slot at all is given up. The reason for giving up is placing it does not keep it, which is a rational judgement grounded in experience. Being rational is what makes it hard to overturn.

“Being Chased by Work” Comes Out of an Asymmetry in the Obligation to Respond

When you are chased, what is actually occurring is a state in which the signal to start comes from outside. What to begin and when is decided not by your judgement but by a message that has arrived or a date that has been fixed.

This is independent of the volume of work. With a small volume, if every signal to start comes from outside, you are chased. Conversely, with a large volume, if the order is decided by you, the sensation of being chased is unlikely to arise. Being chased sounds like a word about quantity, and it is in fact a word about order.

Here the asymmetry of the obligation to respond takes effect.

A demand arriving from outside formally carries the option of no reply, and the cost of not replying arises immediately. A late reply moves the other party’s schedule and changes the quality of the relationship. The cost is immediate, and it arises in a form visible to another person.

And what of failing to keep a plan you set yourself? The cost arises late, and it is visible to nobody. Skip the plan to prepare a document and nothing happens today.

This asymmetry tips judgement in the same direction every time. Each individual judgement is rational, because avoiding a cost arising in front of you is more certain than avoiding a cost arising late. As a result of accumulated rational judgements, your own plans alone are always the ones deferred.

A deadline and a counterparty could then be created for your own plans too.

This works. Promise externally and things tend to be kept. This, however, is a response that increases the obligation to respond. A new obligation to respond is being created in order to secure time for yourself. As quantity it has increased; as ownership it is unchanged.

This response works correctly in a transitional period, when something has to be stacked while the right to decide is still thin. Borrow an external deadline and build the moving form first. This is a valid move, and forgetting that it is borrowed makes it impossible to remove later.

And the state has a consequence that arrives later. What to do when not being chased becomes unknown.

Continue for some years a life in which every signal to start comes from outside, and the circuit for starting without a signal goes unused. A function unused becomes sluggish. So when a stretch of open time appears, it cannot be taken up.

The verdict issued at this point tends to be I am poor at resting or my motivation has fallen. What has actually fallen is the frequency of the work of deciding the start for yourself. And the reason the frequency fell is that there was structurally no occasion for that work.

Autonomy Gets Treated as Something Given, and the Conditions Come First

Being independent and being autonomous are settled by different conditions.

The framework Edward Deci and Richard Ryan formalised in 1985 — self-determination theory — organises motivation as a continuum running from what arrives from outside to what comes from within. What is needed here is the thing that framework calls autonomy. Autonomy as used there means neither doing it alone nor being instructed by nobody; it points at a state in which the reason for the action is experienced as your own.

This distinction matters because the more independent someone is, the more readily they are assumed to hold autonomy. The inference nobody employs me, therefore I am autonomous looks only at the form.

In fact, even when independent, the reasons for action can all be arriving from outside. Client demands, movements in the market, dates. If the reasons are not experienced as your own, formal independence does not guarantee autonomy.

Meeting customer demands is the essence of a business, and calling that heteronomy is strange — the question stands. And it is a correct question. Meeting demands is not in itself heteronomy. The fork is whether you decide whether to take that demand on. Meeting a demand you selected and took on is an autonomous action, and something taken on in a state with no options becomes a different experience even at identical work.

The word is not their coinage. The concept of autonomy has its origins in prior research, and what the two of them did was to fold it into a single framework as one of the basic needs common to human beings (Ryan & Deci, 2000, American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78). So reading it as they proposed the concept of autonomy is not accurate.

The handling of this word has a by-product. Treat autonomy as a state and you end up waiting until it is obtained.

Think in the order time of my own will come once I can work autonomously and the present becomes a period of waiting. While the waiting goes on, however, no work of increasing the right to decide is performed. Autonomy is not something obtained by being given; it comes to hold afterwards, as a result of widening the range you can decide over, one at a time.

And this waiting tends to run long, because no condition for when autonomy arrives is indicated by anyone. Not being indicated, no verdict of attainment is issued either.

Where the Right to Decide Comes From — Counting the Composition of the Dependence

How, then, does the right to decide increase?

The answer is that it is decided by what happens when that demand is declined. If the business continues when you decline, the right is there. If declining stops the business, it is not. This is not a matter of feeling but of the composition of the income.

So what has to be counted is settled. The share of income taken by the single largest counterparty.

One caution about the counting. The share may be counted in working hours rather than in revenue. Where a counterparty is small in revenue and occupies most of the hours, the cost of declining shows up on the side of the hours instead. If the two ways of counting reverse the order, the reversal is itself information.

The higher this share, the more that counterparty’s demands function as de facto orders. They do not look like orders because the contract is written in an equal form, and equality of form and equality of bargaining power are different things.

As the share falls, the same demand turns into something you can choose whether to take on. The content of the demand has not changed. What changed is what happens if you decline.

Increasing the counterparties increases the parties to deal with, so time falls rather than rises.

This does in fact occur. Spread across five counterparties and there are five points of contact, with more administration to carry. In the short term, time falls.

What falls, however, is the residue, and what rises is the right to decide. And these two are separate axes. Which to prioritise is decided by which is currently under pressure. Where sleep is being cut into, the residue comes first; where quantity exists and is not usable, the right to decide comes first.

Spreading is not always correct. Increase the counterparties and each individual trade becomes smaller, which can lower the unit price. Holding income then requires more jobs, and hours worked rise after all. So spreading is not an end in itself but merely one means of producing the right to decide. The same end can be reached without increasing counterparties, by cutting income loose from hours worked.

Count the share of dependence and a configuration not previously visible becomes visible.

A long-standing trade comes to be recounted as dependence. The better the relationship, the more this recounting produces resistance, because being a good relationship and being a high dependence are compatible.

A caution here. Counting is not ending that relationship. Counting is a measurement of where you stand, not a decision about action. What is done after measuring is a separate judgement, and one of the options is to do nothing as a result of having measured.

Time Can Return Without Attention Returning

There is one further axis, separate from both quantity and ownership. Attention.

Herbert Simon presented in 1971 the proposition that in an environment rich in information the scarce resource is not information but human attention. A wealth of information produces a poverty of attention — this observation came later to be handled under the term attention economy.

In business this state appears in an extreme form. Messages arrive by several routes and all of them are placed in a form that can be seen at once. What can be left unseen and what has to be seen sit side by side on the same screen.

What occurs here is the fragmentation of attention. Seeing one message takes little time. Returning to the original task after seeing it, however, can take longer. If another message arrives during the return, the return starts over.

The result is a state in which the record shows ample working time and not once does a stretch of thinking hold. The time remains, and the size of the object that can be handled in that time has shrunk.

The notifications need only be turned off.

This is effective. The range that can be turned off, however, is bound by the same condition as the range that can be declined. Messages from a counterparty carrying an obligation to respond remain as unease even when turned off. With no notification arriving, the number of times you go and check for yourself can even rise. At that point the quantity of fragmentation is unchanged.

The problem of attention can worsen independently of the problem of time: where hours worked have been reduced and the right to decide increased, and the fragmentation alone remains. A verdict of free and unable to concentrate is issued here, and this does not mean the first two failed. The third axis has simply not moved.

And where this axis has not moved, the gains from the other two lose their outlet. In a state of fragmented attention, the work of deciding the use of your time cannot itself be executed.

Deciding a use requires tracing, over a certain span, what you currently have an interest in. This work does not finish in a few minutes. And in an environment interrupted every few minutes, it is never once completed.

This axis also has the property of being hard to measure yourself. While you are fragmented there is no continuous stretch of time in which to notice that you are fragmented.

So the phenomenon of time opening up and no use coming to mind can have two causes: the candidates not having been updated, and the work of searching for candidates being continually interrupted. The former moves towards recovery once candidates are gathered again; the latter is unlikely to recover unless the environment changes. And by sensation both appear in the same form — nothing comes to mind.

The Order — Quantity First, or Ownership First

Between the two axes of residue and the right to decide, which to take up first has an order to it.

One criterion tells them apart. If a stretch of time opened up now, could it be used?

If it could not, the same thing will happen when quantity is increased. In that case, start from the side of ownership. If it could, the state is simply one of insufficient quantity, and starting from the side of quantity works.

Where the start is from the side of ownership, the first thing done is neither spreading nor negotiating. It is to make one stretch of time in the day whose use you decided yourself. The length does not matter. Thirty minutes is enough.

What matters is not the length but deciding the use of that time in the preceding week rather than on the morning of the day. Decide on the day and the day’s situation becomes the input. Decide the week before and the one deciding is you as of that week.

This is, in the end, the same as placing a slot on the calendar.

The form is the same. What differs is that the object is not to keep the slot. The object is to perform the work of deciding a use for yourself at least once a week. Even if the slot is broken, the work of deciding has been performed. What has gone sluggish is the circuit for deciding, not the will to keep.

This method does not work in a state where the right to decide is entirely absent. If every hour is filled with obligations to respond, deciding leaves nowhere to place it. In that case the composition of the dependence has to be moved first.

Resume it and something comes out first. The state of having nothing you want to decide.

This is a reaction worth anticipating. Ask what do you want to do after years of moving on signals from outside, and nothing may come out. Nothing comes out not because motivation is absent but because the candidates have not been updated.

During a period in which attention went to responding, the candidates hardly increased. So the first few weeks are more practical spent gathering candidates than deciding. Rush here towards finding what I want to do and candidates are borrowed from outside again.

And there is one further situation in which the order is easily mistaken. Cutting into quantity immediately after deciding to start from the side of ownership.

Spreading across more clients to increase the right to decide, or reducing one heavily depended-on account. Executing either raises hours worked in the short term, because both the work of finding new counterparties and the work of recomposing the existing configuration are added on top of present hours.

At this point, if the side of quantity is already at its limit, taking it up at all becomes impossible. So even where the verdict ownership first is issued, if there is no margin from which to start, the margin has to be produced first. As an order it is three stages: produce margin (quantity) → move the right to decide (ownership) → the margin increases structurally.

The five responses that draw boundaries on the calendar take on a different role here. As a means of solving the pressure itself it does not work; as a means of producing the margin to start from, it does. The same technique carries a different role according to where it is placed.

Put the Reading Outside the Felt Sense

Three things can be used for reading it. No benchmark figures are given, because their meaning changes with the composition of the business.

First, look at the share of income taken by the single largest counterparty. This is what was counted as the composition of dependence. If this share is falling, the right to decide is increasing. If it is rising, then even at the same pressure on time, the state has worsened.

The merit of this indicator is that it is independent of the sensation of pressure. Busyness thins with familiarity; this share does not thin.

Second, look not at how many times you declined but at what happened when you declined.

Count the times and declining becomes an end in itself. What should be looked at is the result. If you declined and nothing happened, the right to decide already exists in that area. If you declined and income fell, it does not yet. This record moves faster than measuring the composition of the dependence directly.

Third, look at whether the use of the time that opened up was decided on the spot or decided in advance.

What was decided on the spot is a candidate from outside. What was decided in advance is a candidate of yours. Look only at whether the proportion is moving. Do not look at whether the content was good.

None of the three moves week by week. Movement takes months to become visible. To read in the short term, look not at the indicators themselves but at whether they are being measured.

Only the sense of having left something undone remains, and what was left undone cannot be stated. It cannot be stated because what remains in memory is the time spent, not the time decided by someone. On a day that went as planned there is no shortfall on the side of time. The shortfall is on the side of the count of decisions. A quantity never measured cannot be recalled either.

The responses on offer do work, once the condition is there. Priorities, ways of declining, the placing of slots — in the hands of someone who holds the right to decide, all of them function. What was not written down was the single line saying that the condition comes first. With that line missing, what is left on the side of a reader without the condition is only the record of not having executed them.

And after counting the share of the top counterparty, whether to move it is a separate judgement. One outcome of counting is deciding, for now, not to move it. Between measuring and deciding, a gap is permitted.

The point that the composition of income decides the right to decide is dissected in detail from the economic side. The mechanism by which efficiency gained does not stay with you is handled in Why raising productivity does not leave you with free time, and the process by which dependence gathers on a single counterparty in The ceiling built into selling time.

Widening the range you can decline requires deciding again, from your own side, what the price is attached to in the first place; that discussion sits closer in Getting off the price competition. The mechanism by which the time itself is spoken for is handled in Having no time is not a problem of management.