The Noble Pursuit of Time in “The Fifth Place”

Published in

Grey Swan Guild

11 min readJul 14, 2023

You wanna go where everybody knows your game and brain

“Beyond your home life, your professional life, your local community, and your industry, exists another place where you can unfurl whatever talent, perspective, ambition or passion outlet you have that isn’t getting nearly enough time and attention in your other four domains. Welcome to‘The Fifth Place’, welcome to the Grey Swan Guild.” — Sean Moffitt, Founder of the Grey Swan Guild

In 1989, sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third place,” describing a place beyond home and work where people could gather, relax and talk. It both described and was adopted by many of our neighborhoods’ favourite local gathering places — Starbucks.

You just didn’t purchase a coffee from Seattle’s favourite siren, you savoured it, you simmered it, you contemplated it. Whether by yourself and people watching, or with others and sharing the news and gossip of the day, Starbuck’s Third Place (and other destination coffee shops) have become the town square for many of us in urban and suburban settings.

Starbuck’s experience is designed for that alternate not-work, not-home experience. Starbucks’ customers visit their java piazza six times per month, their most intense fans do it 18x per month. We don’t just grab a coffee, we Starbucks (as a verb)! Patrons linger in stores, taking in the all-sensory experience, indulging in the simple experience of spectating or conversing with a friendly face, which often is their favourite glimpses and moments of the day. It’s also what we lost during COVID, as over 80% of its customer transactions at Starbucks took place at drive-thru locations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A New Division of Our Lives — Five Places

There is one common enemy most of us have. We are limited to the 168 hours we have in any given week. No matter how much wealth you have, connections and fans who follow you, or charm or appeal you embody, we are all faced by the same clock. And 168 hours is the weekly reality we all facc.

At the Grey Swan Guild, we believe when you are invested in time and feedback effectively across all five of life’s Places, you are at your best. Maslow might call this self-actualization. Aristotle and later Seligman might call this eudaimonia (or the good life) — using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification. Csíkszentmihályi might call this being in flow state (across a full week). The idea of leading a life fully immersed with a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, enjoyment in the process of the activity and avoiding the silos or compromises of being shackled to just one narrow place. We think you need to invest in all of the below places to be in self-actualized, flowy eudaimonia.

The Balancing Act of Flow States (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Positive Pyschology)

First Places — Your Home Place Life

In my home country of Canada, our average population spends 43 per cent of each dollar they earn on housing-related costs. This tilted investment barometer is not dissimilar in other parts of the world. You’d have to agree — if you spend that much money on your home, we hope you are having a great 1st place life. Family, friends, roommates and a personal abode of safety and comfort play a foundational role in our development as humans.

COVID changed the time calculus of our First Places, with the time spent at home pushing up from 50% to 62% of waking time or about 17.5 hours per day (when you add in sleep time). As much as we are codifying the value of all the places in this post, three-quarters of our time consumption is not being spent in the 1st Place — it is our dominant influence.

Many found the pandemic an important reappraisal of their times, others found this life-pivot stressful, confining and mental health impinging. In whatever hours you spend, having a home place with family and friends sets up success in all the others. many successful remote workers are finding happiness when they find proper integration between their First and Second Places — home and work.

Second Places — Your Work Place Life

The US Bureau of Labour just released their latest report on how we spend our time professionally. On average, those who worked at home did so for 5.4 hours on days they worked, and those who worked at their workplace did so for 7.9 hours.

Two in five Americans now also include some kind of side hustle in their lives. We are increasingly moving into a gig, freelance and passion outlet world. My interpretation is that this is a net good thing — firstly, because it allows people to pursue things they have control of and are likely outlets of creativity and passion and secondly, it’s likely a reflection of the disempowerment and lack of engagement that they feel at their mainline work. It also is magnifying the importance of our Second Place.

Depending on who you talk to and what context you have, work-life balance and integration is either perfect, just okay or one of the big stresses of people’s lives. We might be a little greedy. Gone are the days for most of us of an early industrial day of 14 hours per day x six day weeks. Even with our shortened weeks, people do however get stuck in ruts doing the same things, every day in the same manner. Stasis and lack of development starts to set in.

Unlike the bad raps meetings and procrastination get in the major headlines, the Second Place concerns are outweighed by the burnout, personal time management, multitasking and repetitive work. You get stuck in brainless ruts — fully 81 percent of workers say they spend less than 3 hours a day on creative work, and 76 percent spend less than 3 hours a week on strategic work. There is much to be improved on in Second Places, we covered some of that in our report on Leadership.

Third Places — Your Local Neighbourhood and Community Life

Let’s include your Starbucks’ experience in this bigger Third Place bucket of time spent. COVID created a big cannon-sized hole in this time spent. Time spent alone was way up in the last three years, and time spent with non-household members went calamitously down.

We spend an average amount of 135 minutes in a shopping mall, we stopped doing that. We spend 11.7 hours per week on our health and fitness, that certainly wasn’t happening in a gym. Activities that produce general cognitive and health benefits are ceding time to streaming, chilling on the couch, and screen time. Reading (10–20 minutes per day) is criminally low. Spending time in outdoors and nature has nosedived (nearly half the population doesn’t participate in any outdoor recreation at all, only 18 percent gets out at least once a week). Socializing, particularly for anybody under 40, has drifted online not real life.

The Third Place has been under attack. My hope is there is a level setter post-pandemica on how we effectively spend our time here and that various private and public entities can sustain themselves in supporting and promoting this effort, and making it a key part of our cultures again.

Fourth Places - Your Industry Life

The old adage is sometimes still true, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Time spent inside your industry world is important for the ambitious and successful. A Referral Institute study found that people who said “networking played a role” in their success spent an average of 6.3 hours a week participating in networking activities, three times more than non-networkers.

Supporting this craving and need for industry networking is a global events industry that has climbed off the canvas and is alive and well again expected to nearly triple in value to a whopping $2.194 trillion by 2028 — quite the uptick from the $887 billion the market commanded in 2020. Event organizers can occasionally forget that business people’s motivation for attending these events is: #1 — to get fresh perspectives and stay up to speed with industry leading edge practices; #3 — to understand how-tos and tips of industry best practices; but importantly also #2 — to network with others (Source: Futureproofing’s Business Stage Act). 78% of in-person event attendees prefer to network with other in-person attendees. Conversely, 69% of event planners believe it’s more difficult to provide networking opportunities at a virtual event.

Being seen, seeing others and learning about the breakneck speed developments happening in your industry is mission critical and healthy for novice, up-and-coming and established professionals. The evidence suggests that both frequency and attendance hasn’t fully climbed back to pre-pandemic levels, which in part may be contributing to the lack of external stimulus, fulfillment, connections and culture people feel in their current employment.

Expected frequency of attending industry events in 2023 (Marketing cohort)

Fifth Places— Your Guild and Crafted Life

The best among us need to get out of our small boxes and narrow life swimming lanes. The uncertain, complex and sped up superCAFFEINATED world around us demands it.

Everyone of us needs to find expeditions and habits of the mind to dance across disciplines and be able to channel what we have learned from concepts, experiences and people we interact with in our day-to-day lives with the beyond conventional, outside-of-the-norm and more-than-superficial to expand their potential.

Our Guild professionals tap into this very human instinct to seek new frontiers, channel new abilities, fuse in new knowledge, and scaffold better approaches. We all need to reinvest in ourselves to build our craft, frequently together. That’s what our Grey Swan Guild does.

As David Epstein mentioned in his great book Range:

“The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.” ― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Upon joining us, the average Guild newbie suggests that have about seven hours to dedicate to the Guild each month (although there is a bug variance around the mean here). They recognize the value of Guilds beyond their four other places. Once again in a post-modern world. Guilds are back in vogue.

As detailed by the visual below — Benefit of Places — there are different motivations for spending time in the different places. In our Grey Swan Guild’s, investing in your craft (and life long skills), building wider, more balanced views (and making better sense of the world and what’s next), learning about the leading edge practices and ideas (unlike industry Fourth Places where you are likely grabbing best practices) and joining ventures and experiments (of mutual interest and joint benefit) are the deal.

Grey Swan Guild — Standard Bearers for Fifth Places Everywhere — we just help professionals make better sense of the world and next Grey Swans

When we started in 2020, the Guild became a safe haven, almost a support group, for people experiencing the pandemic in their own small universes. We were a tether to an outside world we could no longer visit. and a global community that we could no longer travel to. Making better sense of what had happened to the loosened constraints of our society was the bonus from the overall experience.

in 2021, we started to shift our thoughts to making this sustainable and embracing a larger set of interests than the occasional isolated events and publications we pulled off. We became a community with regular events on things like Clubhouse (remember that), News Wraps on Medium that made sense of the world every week on Medium, workshops we called Ateliers, conversations we called Salons, a twenty-four celebration of our work together called The Day of the Swan and an established governance and oversight board.

In 2022, we took one step further, first, by advance planning our year, building a General Assembly of our front row of members who voted on our pursuits of the year. We embraced a larger set of interests and hosted a futures and foresight event 1,000 Day Radar and a literary event GSG Book Festival. We created monthly intake sessions of new members within our Feature City Town Halls and New Member Regattas. And we invested heavily in some of learning agenda by building our Craft-Building Series (now 60- editions deep).

In 2023, we took one more formal step into Guild-dom by creating a ventures group (Cygnus Ventures) with plenty of facets of interesting experiments, spinouts and value-seeking startups:

Cygnus Publishing (and our just launched book Uncertainty)
The Radar Collection (and our foresight group dedicated to publishing early radar analysis and scenarios of the future)
The Weathervane Research & Intelligence Group (and our quarterly interval of research deep dives)
Cygnus Sprints — an on-demand group of our finest guild talent aimed at working on client projects with the idea of making progress on their challenges in 13 weeks or less
Futuregazing — imparting the same craft-building and lifelong skills to a group of people that weren’t getting it in the classroom — 13 to 17 years olds

A certified Thought Leader presenter group, Guild Masterclasses, Network of Podcasts, Compendium & Compass resource library/systems map and Visualization group are all waiting in the wings. Hosting our first real live events will happen in the Autumn as we reflect the changing world around us yet again.

Come join us and balance your life out in our Fifth Place!

Author: Sean Moffitt, Grey Swan Guild Founder and CEO, Cygnus Ventures

Cygnus Ventures (powered by Grey Swan Guild ) — Improving Our Craft Together

Now coming up to our 4th year of our Guild, we have built eleven ventures to tap into the enourmous value and reservoir of talent found inside the Guild.

Here’s what you can do in the Guild:

Learn about the Guild: https://www.greyswanguild.org/
Read our Content: https://greyswanguild.medium.com/
Attend our Events: https://www.greyswanguild.org/calendar
Become an Official Guild Member: https://bit.ly/gsgsmemberform
Go Deeper as a Global Sensemaker: https://bit.ly/lofsenseform
Learn more about our ventures: https://www.greyswanguild.org/cygnusventures
Join a Venture: https://bit.ly/joincygnusventures
Participate in 2023 Guild events & projects: https://bit.ly/gsgparticipationregister2023

Do more than belong: participate. Do more than care: help. Do more than believe: practice. Do more than be fair: be kind. Do more than forgive: forget. Do more than dream: work. To get directly involved in any one of our 11 Cygnus Ventures (powered by the Grey Swan Guild) including producing or hoisting our Craft Building Series, click here.