"I don't have time"

and other meaningless phrases

There are many things that irritate me in life (people that stand on the wrong side of escalators, drivers that think doing 40 in a 20 mile an hour zone is cool) but one of them is phrases that sound serious but don’t mean anything. The words “I don’t have time” is a stone cold classic of this genre.

If I were being pedantic (and clearly I am), my issue is less with the phrase and more with how it is used. Often, this phrase is a stand in for: “under the current circumstances, with the current commitments that I have, I don’t have time to do this thing”. There are some instances where those commitments are truly immovable - for example, I don’t have time to continue a conversation with you at 5.30 on a Friday when my kid’s nursery closes at 6pm and I need 30 minutes to get there. And there are other instances where the commitments are not quite as solid but are clear and understandable: for example, if I have an important funding deadline and need to spend the next three hours working on an application, and someone comes and asks me to join a lengthy planning meeting about what we’re doing next year, it’s legit to say that I don’t have time to do this.

But let’s push this last scenario a bit further. Let’s say I’ve put aside the next three hours to work on an important funding application and someone comes in and tells me there’s been a crisis of some kind - a major and time-sensitive snarl-up in a project, or a staff member being unexpectedly ill or injured. I would probably find time to engage with this issue - maybe with just a quick chat, or maybe by drafting in someone else to work on the funding application, or maybe by squeezing in some out of hours time to get the funding agreement done if the urgent issue needed an hour or more. In this instance, I have made the time to handle this new challenge, because it was, in that moment, more important than the funding application - in a way that the future planning meeting was not. So, in this case, and in most other cases, what we mean when we say “I don’t have time” is really “I’m not going to prioritise this”.

In the example above, the prioritisation is fairly straightforward - there’s a defined length of time (one afternoon) and it's pretty clear what should take precedence in each version of this scenario. However, when we use this phrase in larger and less specific contexts, its true meaning becomes hazier. A leader who never answers their emails and says they don’t have time to keep on top of their inbox is, in essence, saying that they think they’re too important to play by the same rules as everybody else in their organisation. Someone who is a member of a Board or a working group and regularly doesn’t turn up because “they don’t have time” means they’re not prepared to dedicate the hours needed to the commitments that they make.

Let’s be clear, I’m not talking here about the odd week where your inbox is out of control or that one time you couldn’t attend a Board meeting because there was a work crisis - it’s more the consistent pattern of using time as an excuse for not doing the things we don’t really like doing. When someone senior uses this phrase, it’s very hard to argue with - most people in leadership jobs are busy and do have a lot of pulls on their attention. But I think it’s worth remembering that, for the most part, the words “I don’t have time” are meaningless. This is particularly evident when you contemplate the vast amount of busy people who do make time to do the things they say they’ll do: the cliche of “if you want something done, give it to a busy person” is, in my experience, startlingly accurate.

Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

I have tried to ban the phrase “I don’t have time” from my vocabulary and replace it with something more accurate. If someone asks for a meeting during a week when I really need to be focused on something else, I’ll tend to say something along the lines of: “that week’s really busy for me - can we try another time?”. Similarly, if I need to back out of a commitment because something more important has reared its head - I’ll generally just say that. And, ultimately, if I’m continually prioritising other things over an ongoing commitment like a Board position or a working group, then I’ll step down from it - if you can’t do something properly, then don’t do it at all.

The other, very similar, phrase that often gets bandied about is “there’s no money”. I remember once being told this by several staff members when I arrived at an organisation - but when I looked at the company’s bank balance and latest budget, it seemed to me to be in a much healthier position than other organisations I’d either worked at or knew about, who’d all managed to survive just fine. It’s even more important, I think, to be accurate in your language about money - your time is your own, but what an organisation does (and doesn’t) spend money on is demonstrable to everyone. More on that story next week…

I’d argue that most people have more time available to them than they think they do - and I’d also observe that when someone really wants to do something, they make it happen, because it matters to them. Don’t limit your options by buying into the phrase “I don’t have time” - instead, you could frame it as “I could - but I’m choosing not to because I’d prefer to prioritise something else”. Language shapes our world and by framing ourselves as a victim to the short amount of hours available in the day, we deny ourselves agency - time is finite, and that’s precisely the reason that we should be clear-eyed about the choices that we make in how we spend it.