Your Time Is Your Own
Stop following someone else’s clock, someone else’s definition of “purpose”, “productivity”, or “success”.
Rescue the time you need to pursue your dreams with temporal freedom coaching—and rekindle the passion that’ll get you where you want to go.
Let’s get you back your time so you can give your time back to the world.
Post-Capitalist, Post-Self-Blame
Daymaker Coaching is explicitly post-capitalist.
We believe that many of the maladies we presently experience can be addressed by questioning the fundamental assumptions of our society—which directly determine our identities as workers, social actors, and so much more.
These assumptions and behaviors lead to destructive self-blame, defeatism, and despair:
You don’t need to be “anti-capitalist” for this coaching—we all still live in this world and have to pay our bills within it. But this coaching works best for post-capitalists—people more interested in pursuing broader meaning than pursuing money and self-centered materialism—and pre-entrepreneurs—people who want more control over their time to pursue their own ideas, passions, and interests.
And it works best for those who are willing to discard some of the default stories we have been given.
Beyond Immediate Gratification
We have two fundamental identities under capitalism—producer and consumer.
In our producer life we:
- Work unquestioningly, whether or not it feels meaningful
- Take orders from others
- Run into stress, headaches, etc
- Leave our day feeling unfulfilled, incomplete, unfree
In our consumer life we:
- Jump onto TikTok, Instagram, social media
- Watch TV, read the news, procrastinate on creative endeavors
- Eat, drink, smoke—turn off our brains
- Consume or buy what makes us feel good in that instant
There’s a fundamental illusion here: we believe we’re free as consumers but not as producers. We believe we watch what we want to watch, buy what we want to buy, consume what we want to consume. We therefore believe money is the solution—more money means more freedom to choose.
But our lives as consumers are oriented solely around immediate gratification. We are “free to choose”, but only whatever our trained dopamine reactions demand—whatever next algorithmic bait TikTok has for us, whatever sensational headline can get our attention.
Our aim in this practice is to return your freedom where it belongs—to your life as a producer, creator, teacher, leader, parent, or whatever other working identity calls to you. This is true choice.
Learning to Live In Long Time
To become a free producer is the goal—to stop being a consumer in the throes of instant gratification or a productive cog whose time is dominated by someone else. To do this, you need to orient your time differently.
Before capitalism, our primary relationship to time was Eternal Time—the religious afterlife:
With capitalism, the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction, focusing us on Short Time—the immediate payoff of economic profit, short-term goals, and instant gratification:
Post-capitalism frees us to focus on Long Time. This is the measure of your whole life, the measure of your passions and purpose that will take a lifetime to fully fulfill.
Temporal freedom coaching is about helping you get over a fixation on Short Time and orienting towards Long Time—freeing you from both the shallowness of short-term goals and the stress, self-flagellation, and dopamine compulsion they give rise to.
Tried And True Techniques—And Then Some
These are a sample of the methodologies we’ll use, all of which will be chosen and tailored to your particular needs and circumstances:
- Temporal freedom coaching: Identifying where your beliefs about time are holding you back.
- Technologies of the self: Tailored reflection, organization, and expansion practices.
- “Productivity” coaching: Productivity for your own time, instead of giving more to your boss.
- Life(time) coaching: How do you orient your life towards your whole life’s horizon?
- Habit coaching: Develop those habits you need to pursue your broader passions.
- Purpose and passion discovery: Find what will give you the fuel for the long work.
- Automation: Find technical ways to take back time that you can use for more meaningful work.
- Zeroing: Make key tasks and habits automatic to avoid spending unnecessary mental energy.
- Gamification: Jumpstart your producer motivations with dopamine-fueling consumer hacks.
- Emotional choice: Show up to each challenge without wasting emotional energy.
- Bespoke tooling: Custom-designed and -engineered solutions to free up more of your time.
And these are a few of the disciplines and intellectual studies that inform this practice:
- Habit tracking and habit science
- Vipassana Buddhist spiritual techniques
- Phenomenology
- Existentialism
- Critical theory
- Journaling practices
- Cognitive behavioral therapy
- Psychoanalysis
- Product development + engineering (for custom tools & automation)
No prior background or future instruction in any of these fields will be necessary, though where you are curious I’m always glad to geek out.
About the Coach
JG has had 12 years of product, growth, and leadership experience in self-improvement technology companies, as well as a continuous self-driven education in political/psychological theory, philosophy, and rhetoric since receiving his BA in these subjects from UC Berkeley.
His transition to coaching draws on his skills as a years-long volunteer on a suicide crisis hotline, 1-1 coaching for members of teams he’s managed, and habit coach certification from Coach.me.
More than anything else, his practice is founded on an intellectual restlessness and desire to improve our present society—starting with the motivation of those who will lead us into our next stage of history.