Time Flies When You’re Working

It is a startling realization when it finally dawns on you. You wake up one morning, and it hits you: you have been at the same job, or in the same career, for five years. Or ten. Or fifteen. You can still feel the nerves of your first day, the novelty of the office layout, the names you struggled to learn. That period of newness feels like it was just a few seasons ago. Yet, when you do the math, when you count the anniversaries on your fingers, you realize that a significant chunk of your life has been spent in this one place, doing this one thing. The years have evaporated while you were working.This is the long game of the same phenomenon that makes a morning disappear. Just as you can look up from your desk and find that two hours have flown by in what felt like twenty minutes, you can look up from the arc of your career and find that a decade has flown by in what felt like a handful of seasons. You sat down at your professional desk as a younger person, eager and perhaps a little uncertain, and you intended to put in your time. You focused on the projects in front of you, the daily fires to put out, the quarterly goals to meet. The years, however, were not paying attention to your intentions. They were quietly, steadily, piling up.Our perception of time is relative to the experiences that fill it. In our working lives, routine is the great accelerator. When your days are largely composed of similar structures, familiar problems, and repeated processes, they begin to blend together. There are fewer novel experiences to act as mental bookmarks. Think back to your first year in a role. It probably feels relatively long and dense because everything was new. You were learning names, systems, and unspoken rules. Your brain was alert, taking in fresh information, which stretched your perception of that time. But by year five, the newness has worn off. You are operating on autopilot for large portions of the day. Your brain, efficient as it is, stops recording every familiar detail, and as a result, entire months can slip by without leaving a distinct memory.The work itself is the culprit, even when it is good work. You are engaged, you are productive, and you are contributing. You are in a state of professional flow that can last for years. But this very engagement creates a kind of temporal blindness. You are so focused on the path immediately ahead of you, on the next promotion, the next project, the next skill to master, that you fail to look up and see how far you have traveled. The years that should feel substantial, that should be heavy with experience and growth, instead feel light and fleeting, compressed by the very focus you applied to them.This realization can be disorienting. You might look at your children, who have grown from toddlers to teenagers while you were in meetings. You might look at friends who have moved away, started families, or changed their lives entirely, while your own landscape has remained remarkably constant. You feel a pang of loss, not for the work itself, but for the time that hosted it. It can feel as though you traded the bulk of your years for a series of paychecks and accomplished tasks, a transaction that suddenly seems unbalanced.But perhaps there is another way to frame this. The years pass quickly when you are working because you are, for the vast majority of them, immersed in the act of living your professional life. The goal, then, is not to try and slow the passage of time, which is impossible. The goal is to make sure that when you finally do look up, startled to find that five or ten or twenty years have gone by, you are not just looking at a blur of meetings and deadlines. You want to see the substance within that blur. You want to see the problems you solved, the people you mentored, the skills you honed, and the contributions you made. The years will always fly when you are working. The only question is whether they will fly by empty, or full.