The person keeping time makes room for everyone else’s freedom.

Timekeeping looks like the restrictive job and is usually the opposite. When one person watches the clock in a meeting or a rehearsal, everyone else can stop half-attending to whether they are running over and simply do the thing in front of them. Without that role, the anxiety about time is distributed across the whole room and nobody is fully present.

If you are running something, take the clock on yourself and say so at the start. If someone else is doing it, make their job easy by finishing when they say. And notice the person quietly holding the schedule, since their work is what let you concentrate.