January, 2013

You know we like thinking about ‘personal productivity’.

As part of our sort of series of things inspired by reading some of Jeanette Winterson’s work, we think it is worth emphasising that PP (personal productivity) is not an end in itself, but a means to enabling us to achieve other things with our lives.

By getting linear time sorted, we can create what we call soul and self time (and what Winterson calls real time). This is time for hobbies, reflection, ritual…Time when you can be ‘off grid’.

In ‘Why be happy when you can be normal’: “I like it that pre-industrial societies, and religious cultures still, now, distinguish between two kinds of time – linear time, that is also cyclical because history repeats itself, even as it seems to progress, and real time, which is not subject to the clock or the calendar, and is where the soul used to live. This real time is reversible and redeemable. It is why, in religious rites of all kinds, something that happened once is re-enacted – Passover, Christmas, Easter, or, in the pagan record, Midsummer and the dying of the god. As we participate in the ritual, we step outside of linear…”  See this and others here.