What time management exercises should we stop giving our clients?
Most productivity advice ignores our lived reality and assumes our time is fully ours to control.
They imply you aren’t navigating caregiving, chronic illness, or survival. They don’t account for interruptions, fluctuating capacities, being under-resourced, or juggling ten invisible things at once.
Not only that, mainstream time management tools aren’t neutral. They’re violent in origin, reflecting a long history of enslavement, colonization, and industrial control. Time is weaponized to regulate bodies and extract labor.
Most popular hacks teach us to override our bodies, punish our rhythms, and measure our worth by output, because that’s what they were designed to do.
And for many of our clients, they’re actively harmful. In this piece, I’m reflecting on some of the popular “time hacks” out there. I’ll share about their historical origins, folks that these hacks often fail, and what we can do instead.
Popular time hacks to be careful when sharing with clients
Time blocking (traditional approach)
Time blocking has roots in plantation and factory systems, where bells, overseers, and time sheets were used to control and extract labor. These systems were designed to enforce discipline, regulate productivity, and surveil human bodies for profit.
For a single mom without consistent childcare, her toddler’s nap schedule shifts daily. She’s juggling school forms, work emails, and unexpected meltdowns. Telling her to “block her time” in the traditional way will easily crumble under the weight of real life.
5 AM Club / Miracle Morning
This idea of early rising as virtuous is deeply tied to the Protestant work ethic and industrial values of discipline and moral superiority. Waking early has always been about being useful to the system.
For a chronically ill person with insomnia who finally gets to sleep at 3 a.m., getting up just two hours later is a fast track to flare-ups. What’s framed as a “success habit” will quickly become a recipe for illness and shame.
Pomodoro method (25-minute work sprints)
The structure of Pomodoro mimics the rhythms of industrial shift work: punch in, punch out, like gears in a machine. This method echoes assembly line logic, where people are treated as parts in a productivity engine, not as cyclical, varied, or embodied beings.
For a neurodivergent artist with executive dysfunction and bursts of hyperfocus, the Pomodoro method can create more friction than flow. Stopping every 25 minutes can feel like yanking your brain out of deep water, right when you were beginning to swim.
Plus who actually takes the 5 minute break? 🤣
Eat the frog (Do the hardest things first)
This push to prioritize labor over softness is again rooted in Puritan, abelist, and capitalist ideals, where rest must be earned through suffering and value comes through productivity. It’s a legacy of moral discipline: suppress your needs, start with struggle, prove your worth.
For someone with complex PTSD, mornings are tender. There is a real need to re-enter the world slowly and gently. Being told to “do the hardest thing first” is not motivating; it’s jolting and destabilizing. It can tank someone’s entire day before it really begins.
Batch your tasks
Batching has historical echoes in industrial production lines, where repetition and monotony were optimized for speed and output. These systems assume controlled environments and consistent capacity…something the vast majority of humans don’t have.
For a parent working from home, batching might sound good in theory, but in practice, it collapses with the unpredictability of life and constant context-switching. Just when they get into a groove, the school calls or the dog needs to be taken out.
Time Tracking
This practice mirrors how enslavers and factory owners monitored labor, using ledgers and time sheets to measure productivity. Their goal was to control and commodify.
For a Black creative who’s healing from productivity trauma, minute-by-minute time tracking can feel like surveillance. They’ve spent years believing their worth must be proven through constant output, shaped by white supremacy and internalized capitalism. Tracking becomes just another tool that creates mind, body, soul harm.
Start of the week: Sunday
This norm is rooted in Christianized, colonial time structures that imposed a seven-day week starting Sunday, erasing Indigenous and seasonal ways of moving through time. When we hear “start your week right,” it actually means “start your week our way.”
For a bartender whose workweek starts on a Thursday, being told to “reset” every Sunday feels out of sync, irrelevant, and isolating. It disconnects them from their reality and reinforces a dominant cultural clock that isn’t theirs.
Design your ideal week
Ideal-week planning emerged from corporate productivity models meant to shape workers into efficient tools. But “ideal” often ends up meaning unrealistic and optimistic in order to please our bosses (internal or otherwise).
For a neurodivergent caregiver, no week is ideal. Their capacity shifts daily. Their responsibilities shift hourly. Trying to map out an “ideal” only highlights what they can’t predict or control, and what they wish were different. It often leaves them feeling like they’ve failed before they’ve even begun.
What can we do instead?
If you’ve shared (or tried) any of the hacks above, or other time hacks, you’re not alone.
Most of us Westerners have inherited these time systems. They’re all we know.
However, when we don’t know or ignore the histories behind the tools we teach, we risk replicating the same systems we and our clients are trying to heal from and move beyond.
Time isn’t just a schedule. It’s how we move, relate to one another, survive, and hopefully thrive. You don’t have to pass the harm on by minimizing time to hacks.
You can help your clients experience time liberation.
You can offer time practices rooted in:
Compassion, not compliance
Honest pacing, not punishment
Awareness, curiosity, and care, not control
The Holistic Time Practitioner Certification is a 12-week training for coaches, therapists, healers, and space holders who are ready to unlearn harmful time narratives and guide folks into a more liberatory, life-giving relationship with time.
You’ll learn how to:
Support clients in navigating procrastination, capacity, and follow-through with care
Rebuild your own relationship to time, beyond grind and guilt
Integrate liberative pacing and structures into your own practice
