Giving Your Time and Your Life: How to Volunteer Smarter and Understand Cultures of Time
Time is the one thing that you give that you can never get back. - Anonymous
One of the biggest paradigm shifts necessary for understanding time is that not everyone has the same twenty-four hours in a day. A result of this mindset is that it plays to a set of professional expectations that favor certain individuals and kinds of work more than others, and most significantly, to particular cultures more than others.
Whether you are a university student or a working professional looking for opportunities to volunteer or a retiree hoping to lend some insight and learn something new, not everyone has the same availability–or compatibility with particular organizations.
One of my favorite books I enjoyed as a university student was The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time by Edward T. Hall, which talked about various cultures and their understanding of time. Whether it is the rigidity of Germans and the Swiss peoples and their strict adherence to schedules or the “rubber time” of the many cultures in the Indonesian and Philippine archipelago that suggest a nebulous but open time frame instead (and requires a lot of flexibility for people used to punctuality), Hall describes how these views of time affect how people think, which in turn impacts how they manage their work culture.
Some cultures view time as a linear concept, others see it as a circular one, for example, the Hopi language, which not only affects their mental perception of time, but their experience and respect for it. For example: if a legal professional can charge $400 an hour, arguing with someone on the Internet for 15 minutes has wasted $100 that she deserves, and she has far better reasons to share her 15 minutes than to deal with someone who has said that the Earth is flat. On the other hand, ask yourself: why would you line up for almost an hour for a five-minute rollercoaster ride? What we can learn from this is that it does not matter how much time you give, but the quality of time that you give as a volunteer: seek to volunteer your skills and potential rather than your time.
Here’s a thought: if you have a consistent 15 hours a week to volunteer and what you do consists of sitting in a back room going through boxes and files, is this fulfilling to you and helpful for the organization? Compare this to someone who has one weekend for a month to create or overhaul an organization’s website, but can’t give more than that. That weekend, which could be five hours on a Saturday or 12 hours on both Saturday and Sunday, could be more beneficial for the organization and a better way to volunteer through quality of commitment versus 60 hours of hanging out in the backroom–which is necessary for some organizations like historical archives, but may not be the best way for certain volunteers to help such as our lawyer from the earlier example who probably wants to get away from the filing cabinets in her own law office!
Consider as well blogging: one look at Medium and various professionals have varying ways of approaching content creation. Some insist that posting 1-2 articles a day is essential to getting your name and reputation set up, while others may call that shameless clickbait and filler content, instead preferring to take their time and make a few quality posts that are consistent hits people can review years later and still find wisdom and insight. The former may follow the Pomodoro Technique for work, which is to set a timer to work for 45 minutes straight with no interruptions or looking at other tabs in your Internet browser, then to take 15 minutes to do absolutely no professional activity and use that to schmooze, take a cigarette break, snack, or even nap. The latter may follow creative waves where nothing can come all week and suddenly, they are inspired and meet their monthly deliverables in the course of a few hours before the deadline. Neither of these approaches are universal, they are set up for specific personality types, and it is important to know what kind of professional capacity you have that matches with your personality type before you can determine how to best volunteer your skills to an appropriate organization.
When you can determine what skills and what kind of volunteer you’d like to be, and what organization may match your availability with the need for your expertise (or perhaps help you develop the expertise if you’re a student or trying to change industries), the most challenging part is personal management and personal time management.
If you have a perfect match, there is a tendency to overcommit and not realize you are still burning yourself out: even if you feel emotionally and mentally fine, your body will still feel the results of no rest. It’s important to set up the most realistic commitment you are willing to give because some organizations will be very eager to get all the help they can get, and it can be very discouraging to have someone come in and decide to back out on the middle of a Wednesday for their first week after promising to volunteer for a summer. This is an example of any number of reasons a prospective volunteer didn’t manage their expectations for how much of themselves that they can commit by 1) not doing due diligence, 2) not realizing that what they felt they could commit was more than they were actually able to commit, 3) not setting up clear expectations.
Ultimately, it’s on you to determine how much of yourself you are willing to give and what you can realistically share, especially if you are doing an unpaid volunteering position. When you know what you are capable of and what you may be worth, it becomes easier to narrow down your prospects so that you are not committing one of the worst crimes: wasting both your time and the organization’s time. If you value your own time, respect other people’s time, whether you are a volunteer respecting an organization, or an organization respecting a volunteer’s valuable contributions.
