Time Is (Not) On My Side

A lot happened recently. I had a birthday. I saw a musical about the music of a decade from sixty years ago and was familiar with many of the songs. I watched a very interesting series about time travel. I spent time listening to a friend tell me about someone they cared deeply for who passed suddenly—they were our age. Time is not on my side.

Not to detract from the Rolling Stones, but Irma Thomas recorded “Time Is On My Side” in April of 1964. The Stones heard it and recorded their version in June, which was released in September. The song was originally written by Jerry Ragovoy and recorded by jazz trombonist Kai Winding, with session singers Dee Dee Warwick, Dionne Warwick, and Cissy Houston singing “Time is on my side—you’ll come running back” in a gospel style over Winding’s trombone melody.

Back to the point of this musing. Time is not on our side. Time is a relentless metronome that ticks off the seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years of our lives. It never relents, never varies, never falters. Regardless of what we do with our time, once it has passed, it cannot be regained.

My birthday reminded me that I’m closer to the end than I am to the beginning. I don’t know when that end will come, but every sunrise moves me toward it. Some mornings I wake up and feel like I have all the time in the world. Other mornings, I’m acutely aware that I don’t. The strange thing is that both of those mornings have the same number of hours in them. What changes is my awareness of how finite those hours actually are.

We live like we have forever. We spend emotional energy on conflicts that won’t matter next month. We pour hours into systems and processes while the people who make those systems work go unnoticed. We plan for futures we may not see while missing what’s right in front of us. I’ve done this. I catch myself doing it still. The inbox feels urgent. The project deadline feels critical. The strategic plan feels essential. And maybe they are, but not more essential than being present with the person sitting across from me right now.

Leadership makes this worse, not better. The more responsibility you have, the more future-focused you’re expected to be. Vision. Strategy. Long-term planning. All necessary, all important. But somewhere in all that future thinking, it’s easy to forget that leadership happens in the present tense. The impact you have on someone today doesn’t wait for your five-year plan to unfold. That conversation you’re too busy for? That’s not a future opportunity; that’s a current reality that’s passing while you’re thinking about tomorrow.

So, what do we do with this? I’m not suggesting we abandon planning or stop thinking strategically. But I am suggesting we get honest about what deserves our time.

Start with presence. Not the kind where you’re physically in the room but mentally somewhere else—the kind where you’re actually there. When someone comes to you with a problem, are you solving it or are you present with them while they work through it? One takes less time but builds nothing. The other takes more time but builds everything. If your time is limited, spend it on what builds.

Next, audit what you’re doing. Not everything on your calendar matters equally, even though we treat it like it does. Ask yourself: if I knew I had one year left, would I still spend three hours in that meeting? Would I still worry about that project the way I’m worrying about it now? Would I still avoid that difficult conversation? The awareness of limited time has a way of clarifying what’s actually important versus what just feels urgent in the moment.

Then focus on dailiness over drama. Legacy isn’t built in the big moments you remember; it’s built in the small moments you might forget. The way you showed up on a Tuesday. The patience you extended when you were stressed. The time you took to explain something when it would have been faster to just do it yourself. Those moments compound. They’re not flashy, but they’re what people remember about who you were as a leader.

Finally, prioritize people over problems. Problems are temporary. Even the big ones eventually resolve or become someone else’s problems. But people? The impact you have on them stays. The trust you build or break, the confidence you instill or undermine, the way you make them feel valued or invisible. That stuff doesn’t evaporate when the crisis passes. If time is short, spend it on what lasts.

I can’t make time be on my side. None of us can. But I can decide what I do with the time I have. I can choose to be present instead of perpetually preparing for a future I might not see. I can choose to invest in people instead of just managing processes. I can choose to lead like every day matters, because the truth is, it does. The metronome keeps ticking. I can’t slow it down. But I can make sure that when it stops, the time I spent was worth something more than just being busy—that’s the Bison Way.