Time, work, and meaning

In this phenomenological study I examined how busy professional people achieve a sense of balance with their time at work. I asked ten professionals to describe work experiences where they felt the most in-balance and productive with their time and where they felt the opposite. I selected subjects from diverse backgrounds using maximum variant sampling with the belief that common patterns in their responses would capture core experiences. Naturalistic inquiry was the model for conducting the interviews and doing convergent and divergent analysis on the data.; A surprising result was that these subjects emphasized achievement, not time, in telling their stories. As a group they felt the most in-balance and productive with their time when they were taking action on the right things. Knowing the "right thing" came from a sense of congruence, processing thoughts internally, and psychologically accepting the task. Taking action was facilitated by having boundaries, being open, being ordered, seeing results, and having freedom to do it their own way.; I concluded time was a barometer for the individuation process with achievement only being the external manifestation of personal growth. Taking action on the rights things represented blending of kairos--internal time which connects us with our unconscious--and chronos--the external time of clocks and calendars that allows us to extend our efforts beyond ourselves. When differentiation and integration both were present in an achievement the subjects felt a sense of balance with their time, represented by time not being an intrusive force. I summarized these conclusions in a model showing the connection of kairos and chronos with achievement, suggested the process of bracketing success experiences for individual insight, and proposed a new approach to facilitating achievement and balance in the workplace based on removing barriers.