Hi Janek,
Last week, I shared that our struggles with time are not about focus, discipline, or productivity.
Since sending that email, I’ve heard from a number of you. Some expressed excitement, others uncertainty. A few asked what this means for the Monk Manual planner itself.
The answer is both simple and complex.
Nothing is changing.
And everything is.
The planner isn’t going anywhere. I still use it every day. It remains a faithful companion in my own life as I work to live more fully through the lens of Human Time.
But what I’ve come to see is that tools were never the core work.
The Monk Manual planner helped reveal, over time, the deeper formative layers that were blocking my progress in becoming.
_________
Over the past eight years, I’ve spent thousands of hours coaching, mentoring, and teaching others around their relationship with time. Whether it be stay at home moms/dads, entrepreneurs of large companies, pastors, therapists, students, or retirees, the work almost always begins in the same place.
People say:
- “I know what matters most to me. I’m just not doing it.”
- “I set intentions, but I don’t follow through.”
- “My days fill up, but not with the right things.”
- “No matter how much I do, I always feel behind.”
They assume it’s a discipline problem, or a focus problem, or a consistency problem.
But if you stay with it long enough, something else becomes clear.
Most people are not confused about what matters most.
They are living inside a model of time that makes aligning with those things almost impossible.
A model that fragments their attention.
A model that trains them to prioritize what is urgent over what is important.
A model that slowly conditions them to live like machines.
It is only when you see the model that the real struggle begins to make sense.
The real issue was never mechanics.
It was the model.
_________
Most of us have inherited what I now call Machine Time.
Machine Time is the industrial model of time.
The industrial revolution did not just change how we worked. It changed how we understood value. Production became the measure.
And even though most of us no longer work on assembly lines, many of us still carry an assembly line imagination for our lives.
We treat time as a commodity to manage, optimize, and use.
As a result, we treat ourselves as a commodity to manage, optimize, and use.
Within this model, your value becomes tied to your output. Your days become organized around efficiency. Even your rest becomes a means to become more productive later.
Machine Time doesn’t just shape how you work. It shapes how you live.
- How you relate to your work.
- How you relate to your family.
- How you relate to yourself.
- How you relate to GOD.
Machines don’t struggle to follow through, wrestle with meaning, or have to choose what matters.
Humans do.
Most of us have been trained to live as if we were machines, implicitly and explicitly.
And if we build our life around optimizing our life to be a better machine, we inevitably get better and better at building a life we don’t actually want.
And perhaps most ironically, Machine Time trades action for progress, leaving us less productive in the end.
This was my story.
This is many people’s story. Perhaps it is yours too.
_________
Over time, I began to see that there was another way to live.
I call it Human Time.
Human Time is not about using time.
It’s about fully engaging and inhabiting it.
It’s about aligning your doing with your being and your becoming.
Human time is a shift from time as commodity, to time as invitation.
Where Machine Time is consumptive, Human Time is creative.
Where Machine Time pulls you away from what matters, Human Time allows you to live from it.
In Human Time, follow-through stops being a character test and starts becoming a design question.
The urgent loses its spell.
Your priorities become livable again.
And the things you know matter stop living in theory.
This is the real work.
Not becoming more productive, but becoming more human.
Not some abstract generic human.
The specific human you were designed to become.
_________
Over the past eight years, this understanding has unfolded gradually.
And over the past year, working with our team, we’ve brought it together into a clear framework.
We call it TimeWise.
I’ll share more about this framework, and its four arenas for reclaiming agency over your time, tomorrow.
In the meantime, I’ve written a short manifesto that will help you recognize Machine Time in your own life, and what it looks like to step out of it:
-> Read the Human Time Manifesto
I’ve also recorded two short videos explaining why so many people feel behind - and what changes when you step into Human Time:
More tomorrow.
All the best,
Steven
MM Founder
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