I’ve Discovered How to Slow Down Time
It’s a brand new day, and it’s exciting. Lots of possibilities and great ideas for the future.
But somehow, from the back of your mind, there’s this ache of urgency and despair that there’s just not enough time in your life for the big things you’ve planned and the hidden gifts you’re going to bring out into the world.
You’ve become so focused on working on your legion of projects that the events of your life have become a blur. Where did the hours and days and weeks and months go? How do you grasp this slippery thing called time? Why does it whoosh by so fast that a whole year is gone before you’ve even taken so much as a single breath?
Time.
It’s just never, ever, enough.
If you could just, perhaps, slow it down, what difference would it make to your life and the people around you?
Three weeks ago, I discovered how, and I haven’t been the same ever since. The funny thing is that the technique is so simple and effective and so obvious in hindsight that I grit my teeth for not having realized it sooner.
You might already be doing it, and if you are, I urge you to share the message with more people.
So what’s this super special technique?
Keep a journal.
That’s right. It’s the single greatest habit you can ever develop and the secret to reframing the way you experience time. Let me explain why.
Glasses for the Mind
Human memory is generally faulty, except for those few with eidetic memory. When you don’t take the time to write down your thoughts, observations, struggles, and triumphs, all of these things amalgamate into a swirling undefined vortex that doesn’t feel like anything significant. We forget the little details that make up our days, making it seem like one huge blur.
Before I finally developed the habit of keeping a journal everyday, I felt time as sand streaming down the middle of my fingers — never something I could hold. But since I’ve started reviewing what I wrote at the end of the week, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how many interesting insights and experiences I’ve recorded. It totally destroyed the notion that I hadn’t done much for that week. Doing so did away with the feeling that how I’ve used my time was inadequate — that I was inadequate.
It’s the same for the future. When you don’t write down your plans and ideas for the future, they remain ill-defined splotches of nebulous thought in your brain, making your future less clear. While we can never really know our future, we can crystallize our destiny by writing down our goals and ideas.
Just as blurred vision prevents you from accurately perceiving your physical reality, blurred thinking prevents you from accurately gauging your temporal reality.
A Timelapse of Your Inner Self
Just as a selfie shows you a representation of your physical self at a point in time, the journal shows a snapshot your inner self. If you’re working on your physical fitness, you’d want to see how you’ve shaped up over time. Why wouldn’t you do the same for your inner life? Journaling lets you do that. When you think about how much of our identity hinges on memory, you will begin to realize the impact of properly recording your past.
Prior to a big client meeting last week, I wrote down how anxious I was about all the possible things that could go wrong. I was worried that the demanding team member might be there and berate my designs. After the meeting, I looked back at those entries and laughed at my anxiety, having seen that none of those overblown fears came to pass. The collected wisdom of my journal entries grant a sense of inner peace and long term perspective, knowing that my moods are temporary things that will eventually pass.
George Creasy had some interesting thoughts about “documenting your ascent” in his article about blogging every day:
How incredible would it be to read what Steve jobs was thinking every single day in his formative years as he was starting Apple? Imagine reading the daily musings of Beyonce or Kobe Bryant as they trained and perfected their skills as a youngster? It would be absolutely amazing, that’s what.
So how does that relate to slowing down time? Simple. It’s easy to lose track of how much you’ve progressed when you don’t keep a record. When you look at a timelapse of a blossoming flower, you can see all the stages of its progression, from bud to full flower. But if you were simply looking at that flower every once in a while, you don’t see the motion because it’s too slow.
When you keep a journal, you gain an accurate picture of your progress over time, a sort of temporal perspective unavailable when you don’t capture each moment in writing.
Written Meditation
Writing a journal is like written meditation. You become aware of your thoughts. You slow down and gain a sense of clarity and stability that you don’t get when you don’t have a habit of structured self reflection.
Matthew Hartill articulates this so well, in addition to a few other benefits of journalling, in his post:
Journaling triggers a more mindful approach to the present. When you know that you will be writing about something, it forces you to consider that today is just another day. To some that may be a sobering thought. But to me, it’s an incentive to stick with the hard stuff. Whether you succeed or fail, today will come to an end. So by dialing in a journaling habit, you know you’ll have to face that blank sheet and testify to my choices.
The act of articulating your thoughts and experiences forces you to evaluate your past. A study from the University of Kent demonstrated that just 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation lengthened the perceived duration of an activity done right after.
Start Today
So get a notebook or open a note in your favorite software. Start writing about your day, your fears, your wins, what makes you feel good and what doesn’t. It doesn’t even have to be long-winded. Leo Babauta of Zen Habits fame only writes short bullet points to make it easy:
I don’t write full sentences — just a bullet point for interesting or important things that happened each day. I only have to write 2–3, though sometimes I write 5–6 if I did a lot. I mix personal and work stuff together. By keeping each day’s entry short and simple, I make it so easy to journal that there are no excuses — it only takes a few minutes!
Journaling works. It alters the way you perceive time by helping you clarify your past, crystallize your present, and chart your future.
It’s time for you to lay the foundation create something significant.
Start journalling. Start living.
