This paper studies how practitioners navigate through and balance different temporal demands in the temporally constraint working environment. Through the qualitative field study based on observations, photos, and interviews conducted in the shipyard, we investigate how project managers perceive time and cope with different temporal demands. Our study shows that expert practitioners engage ongoingly and simultaneously with time as a resource, structure, and process in the context of temporally tense project management. Moreover, our findings indicate that time as a resource, structure, and process are interwoven. Therefore, applying only one temporal lens distinctively will fall short of grasping the temporal complexity of expert practitioners’ working reality and could give an inadequate picture of the challenges associated with project management and organizational life in general.
