The Elusive Art of Making the Most out of your Time
Living with a timer in your pocket
Time is such a weird concept. It is the only metric system available to humanity measuring the duration of any activity or period using an arsenal of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years.
From sun dials, to city clocks , to personal quartz watches, humans were always interested in measuring the time and becoming more and more orchestrated in a social level, and punctual in an individual one.
We have evolved technologically to such a degree that we have managed to reach absolute accuracy. A central world clock dictates the global time and every human on this earth knows exactly what time it is by just checking the mobile device on their pocket or the timekeeping piece on their wrist.
When the clock reads 10.15 you know that you have 15 minutes left before you meet grandpa Joe at 10.30. And vice versa. Simple as that.
Ironically, the more accurate we become with clock-making and timekeeping the more obvious the time relativity controversy becomes.
Time is relative
One hour will always be 60 minutes but 60 minutes on a cocktail party cruise will pass a lot faster than 60 minutes in a work meeting or even 60 minutes waiting outside a toilet stall.
The time perception is relative to the emotional and mental condition that we approach a specific experience and, even though, the time duration can be exactly the same, the perceived elapsed time can vary a lot. Dissatisfaction with the current situation leads to a feeling of prolongation while a feeling of content generates the opposite effect.
In most cases, though, we are dissatisfied with our lives. We are characterized with self-pity and disdain. We are not in the right path we want to be or not the person we are aiming to become. As a result, we greedily and naively hope that in the future our lives will be improved.
You are at your work and look forward to go home, you are home and you look forward to meet your friends in the bar and when you are in the bar you look forward to your next trip coming in two weekends.
And by always keeping an eye towards future improvement of our emotional condition, time becomes distorted on the present.
We do not live in the moment, but we are looking forward to live in the moments of the future.
Time flies
Simultaneously, every human will argue that in a macro level (in terms of years or decades) times gallops with breath-taking speed.
Time can create so many controversies in our brain.
We will complain that the distance between Monday and Friday is unbearable and might feel like a long time, but moments later will say that we feel like it was yesterday when we were still teenagers, or when we met with our significant other for the first time or even started working on our current occupation.
We tend to repress the vast majority of our memories and to store only flashbacks of their most important experiences. The more sentimental or worth remembering the experience, the more details we will remember as years go by. But still it is going to be a compressed recreation of the actual experience.
We do not live in the moment, but we re-live our experiences from the past.
Being mentally absent
Humans are hardwired to get distracted from the ruthless passage of time in order to be productive and to get things done. If we paid attention on every small action we are doing every day, then our brain would require extreme amounts of energy in order to process all the information and to stay constantly focused.
Our brain is barely focused the majority of the day, getting deliberately distracted second after second in order to reduce its energy consumption.
It has happened to most of us, to not remember if we have locked our door or turned off the stove. And that is because our brain was operating with minimum energy requirements, not keeping a back-up of this activity in our hard drives.
And this brain process makes sense when it is applied to ironing your clothes or cleaning your dishes, but it is so addictive to operate in low energy consumption that we tend to zoom out on social events that take place in front of us.
Some of us might spend a day of full energy consumption in our cubicle remembering very little of what happened the whole day after our nine-to-five.
We do not live in the moment, despite us living the moment.
The time relevance issue
Thus, the time relativity problem is triple, since we either postpone activities until it is too late for us to actually do them, or we regret for things we did not do or, finally, we participate in the activities without having the proper level of seriousness or attention.
We do not cherish the moments that we spend with our close friends and family since we possess the trust that we will meet the again in the future.
We do not invest the appropriate time in order to lay the foundations for a healthy lifestyle since we believe that we will always have time to do that in the future.
We do not try to start a new hobby or a foreign language until it is too late and we find ourselves in a position that is impossible to overcome.
We do not spend proper attention to our lunch with our aunt Martha, since it feels mundane.
The prospects and the opportunities of the present are, more often than not, consumed on exchange for future prospects and future opportunities.
We will always be able to do that, or so we think.
And all of a sudden, we wake up being 85 years old and with many regrets about experiences we did not have or people we did not spend enough time with.
But if you need to take one message from this, is that everyone’s time on this earth comes to an end by one second at a time and we have very limited control over that.
By accepting our mortality and the fact that our future opportunities to do something are not limitless facilitates the mentality of living in the moment.
We need to learn to capitalize on the opportunity you have in hand.
We need to spending quality time with your close friends and family.
And most importantly with our own selves.
Living with a timer in your pocket
I have been wondering if we could use our watches in order to manage to live more in the same amount of time. If we could find some hidden utility that most people are oblivious of. If we could use in our benefit the time relativity using our watches.
Allow me the following example:
You have planned a coffee session with your childhood friend John which starts at 15.00 and it will end around 16.00.
Life with a watch: You meet John and you start enjoying your hot Javas around 15.05. You have loads of time before you need to leave. You avoid discussing the reason you have invited John and instead you fool around for the first half an hour and then you or John use your mobiles for 5–10 minutes. Before you know it time is 15.50 and John seems already nervous to leave for his next meeting in his calendar. Finally, you rush in the last 10 minutes to discuss your problems with your wife Susan. The quality of the discussion is relatively low and none of the sides manages to fully emerge in the topic. Finally, you both leave to your next entries in your calendars.
Sounds familiar, right?
This seems like a very inefficient coffee session with John. He is convinced that you have some problems in your life but he cannot fully help you due to limited knowledge on the problem. And you wanted John’s help but now you feel embarrassed for giving him a half-image of the problem.
Life with a timer: Imagine the same scenario, but now you approach your coffee with John as an activity with an expiry date. Imagine that you have a timer in your pocket which shows how much time you have left to discuss your problem with John. You know that you have 55 minutes before you need to part roads. Thus, you immediately discuss with John about your issue and a fully fledged discussion takes place.
Maybe a solution comes into play, maybe not. But at the end of the day, both ends enjoyed a cup of coffee and the deep discussion with each other.
Thus, my approach for living a fuller life revolves around the creation of artificial expiration days (or deadlines).
A (false) sense of urgency makes our brains to burn in order to become more efficient and to find the time to fit all those activities and experiences we want to do. Maybe to actually be there fully focused on the moment, too.
We will spend more meaningful time with our friends, less time in our occupation, more time with our family, we would try more new things, we would take more risks both professionally and socially, we will strive behind our unfulfilled passions, we will not procrastinate as much and eventually we would be the ultimate master of our time.
Imagine that you apply this technique to your whole life in a macro level.
You are 35 and your parents are 65 and your grandparents 80 years old. The average life expectancy is around 75 years of age. You know that you do not have more than 10 Christmas celebrations to spend with your parents and maybe it will be the last Christmas you will spend with your grandparents. Maybe you should cherish those celebrations, or even to try to meet them more frequently before it is too late. The timer is ticking.
Your friend John (remember him from previously, right?) wants to move abroad in 6 months from now. If you meet each other twice a month you will barely see each other 10–12 times before he moves. Shouldn’t you try to make those 10–12 sessions memorable? Like actually focus on making things that count and have discussions that you always wanted to have with him. Maybe take this small trip you always wanted to do the two of you to Budapest for a weekend. The timer is ticking.
You see yourself getting less and less fit but you are so stuck in your routine that you always find excuses not to go for a quick run around the block. Your clothes do not fit any more and you buy new trousers and shirts every few months. If the timer showed that in 10 years from now you will have a health issue because of laziness, wouldn’t you jog at least a few times a week and actually enjoy doing that? Maybe join a gym, too. The timer is ticking again.
The timer will always tick for all the aspects of your life. Maybe we should remind ourselves on which of those timers we need to focus and to take actions.
I hope you get the gist of this.
It is a thought provoking and sometimes morbid way to think like this, but this is what you should be striving for.
To create this sense of urgency. This sense of limited opportunities. This sense of definite time.
Maybe the “timer in the pocket” will not work for you. It is not for everyone after all.
But I guarantee you, the least it can do is to help you enjoy a great discussion over a cup of coffee with your best friend John.
