Our Concept of Time – Part One

In 2004 I started writing a book about Time Management.

I worked on the idea, on and off, until 2010 and then stopped. I know those dates only because I found the data files recently, and the sixteen files ranged in those dates. Fifteen years after my last file creation and I’ve decided to edit them and create this series that will later become another PDF eBook and who knows what else. Over the next few weeks, we'll see if I've learned to manage my time.

Does time mean the same to everyone? There are many conceptions of time. Think about the farmer who plants his crops and then must wait patiently for them to grow so he can harvest them. To the farmer, this is a normal cycle, but to others it may seem to drag on forever.

A prisoner may sit in his cell counting the bars and waiting for seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and even years to go by before he can experience freedom. His concept of time is certainly unique.

Think about a young couple, deeply in love and cherishing the few minutes they can spend together. Unlike the farmer and the prisoner, time flies by much too fast for them.

The one thing we know about time is that we cannot control it. It moves on ceaselessly, no matter what we do. Whether we want time to move faster so we can harvest our crops or experience freedom or prefer it to slow down to have more time with our loved ones, it remains constant.

Finally, we cannot control time. The best we can hope for is to manage it. Better management of your time is the aim of this series.

Where does all the Time go? We all know that there are twenty-four hours each day? That certainly seems like a lot of time. So, why does it go by so quickly? Why do we almost always run out of time before running out of projects to complete? For the answer to that question, let’s break down that twenty-four-hour day realistically.

Before we start, we realize that the time spans described here will not apply to everyone, nor are they considered ideal. I use them only to outline an example and help you understand how we use our time.

Obviously, we never really have twenty-four hours of time available to accomplish the things we want to do. Since we all need sleep and should have at least seven hours a day, there are only seventeen hours left. That still seems like a lot of time, but not all of it is available for productivity. Let’s look at just some basics that most people can’t do without.

Our bodily functions, bathing and dressing, take at least one hour and often more. We all need a little time to relax during the day, and this could be a few minutes and stretch into hours. Time for family and friends varies, and it is difficult to guess. If we are fortunate and flexible, we may wind up with a maximum of twelve productive hours available.

Do you really have twelve hours available for productivity? Not that simple, and there is much more we will consider in part two of this series.

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