Isn’t it always about time? The reality is that everyone in the workforce measures their time: You’re either clocking in and paid by the minute or being paid in bulk and tracking your time to make sure you can carve out a good career and a personal life.

All this to say, time is important no matter who you are. I got my first lesson in this at one of the sales training sessions I attended when the trainer asked us, “Why is time like money?” The answer, of course, is that you can spend it, save it, invest it, etc.

As a rookie salesman, I of course wrote it down in my notes eager to absorb all the wisdom from these oracles. But over a long career, it’s occurred to me that this approach to time management may have shaped my relationship with my schedule more than I’d realized. Specifically, I had this revelation during a car ride recently.

One of my colleagues, Troy, was coming to pick me up for an event. And while I’m a proud early riser, I’m a “walk the dog, read the paper, check my email” kind of early riser, not a “ready to be seen by the public” type. This particular day, I was up at 6 AM to get ready for Troy to pick me up an hour later.

At a quarter to 7, I called to my wife that Troy was picking me up today at 7:00. Then I said, “You know what? Troy is an early person; I bet he’s sitting out front at 12 till and I’ll still be here in my underwear.” To which the woman of my dreams responded, with no small amount of skepticism, “You’ll be lucky if you’re in your underwear.”

What can I say? She knows me.

Sure enough, I get a text from Troy at 6:49 that he’s here and waiting out front, but that I don’t have to rush. Just because I saw this exact situation coming didn’t mean that I liked it; I was indignant. “11 minutes!” I groused to myself. If I had to wait for 11 minutes and do nothing but sit in my car, I’d blow a gasket. In that time, I could get 3 emails returned or formulate an idea and get people to start working on it. 11 minutes is an eternity!

At 7:02 I walked out and, as promised, Troy was very patiently waiting out front. I shared my own perspective on his earliness and we had a good laugh about it. He explained that long ago he’d decided he didn’t like being late, so now he’s always exceptionally early. I asked how he justifies the loss of time, and he said that he’ll spend his time waiting to talk to people or work on an idea, but he couldn’t stand being the last person in a meeting.

I can’t be anything but the last person in a meeting. If you ever have an appointment with me and I’m two minutes early, it means that my world is on fire.

We both laughed about our own peculiarities and went on to have an excellent time at the event. Later, as I reflected on the conversation, my brain kept circling around how we could both be successful professionals with such widely different approaches to time management. If his system worked, I reasoned, then maybe it was worth giving it a try.

My old system worked with a series of color blocks for my schedule. While helpful, this system was extremely rigid and stressful, because once I put down a color block on my calendar, I was then beholden by the business gods and my own anxieties to work on that exact project at that exact time. If a time block opened, I filled it, and fast.

The new approach is a lot looser. Now, I make a list of A, B, and C priorities that I want to work on with special note of tasks with impending deadlines that can’t be pushed back. I’m six weeks into my experiment, which I’m calling fluid time management. Note to the reader: Google doesn’t think anyone else is using this, so, you heard it here first! Regardless of the name, though, my new approach really has cut down on my stress.

I still have anxiety that things won’t get done, of course. But by being more focused on the tasks I want to complete rather than on the exact second that I complete them, I find that, perhaps ironically, I’m not pushing things to the last possible second as often. More often than not, I find myself reaching the end of the day feeling like I got done enough to feel like my day was productive, and I’m not stoking the flames of my own neuroses by managing myself down to the minute.

So my question, as always, is what do you make of going from a highly structured time management system to something less hands-on? I’ll check in again in a month or two (or three if my stress levels are still lower), but in the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this experiment or your own approach to time management!