(Article) What is Time? How You Think About it Can Change Your Life

What is Time? How You Think About it Can Change Your Life

I’m not a theoretical physicist. I’m just an average guy that began the New Year with a trip to the stationary store to buy a calendar. I entered with simple questions; desk or wall calendar, a day book perhaps. What I left with was one much more profound. What is time?

We all have a sense of it, yet ask those around you and you will discover how little we understand about the concept of time. Better still, explore the idea of time from a scientific standpoint and you will find that time is extremely difficult to explain to any amount of satisfaction. We can measure it, sure. We use it throughout our day but without ever fully appreciating its curious, elusive nature. Our lives are arranged around something so ubiquitous and, at the same time, so mysterious that even the greatest minds through history wrestled with its explanation.

Almost two and a half thousand years ago, Aristotle shared the same sentiment I felt in the Staples check-out line, “time is the most unknown of all unknown things.” Newton believed he had adequately understood time as absolute, true, and mathematical only to have his ideas challenged by Einstein’s contention that time is relative and, even more strangely, that past, present and future exist simultaneously. If the two greatest scientific minds who ever approached the subject can’t agree then what hope is there for the rest of us? Set your clock, place the calendar on the desk and hold on as we dive head-first into the rabbit-hole that is time and see if we can make it work for us.

Most people when asked will explain time as a method of ordering separate events. We wake before our day begins and we sleep at its conclusion. Time flows in a constant, single direction only to be portioned according to our imposed units of measurement; seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, years and so on. That’s where it ends with most of us. But these are merely devices to help us interact and make time useful to us. Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean you can say what it is. Just ask any cosmologist about dark matter. They can tell you that it makes up 80 percent of the universe yet, much like time itself, can only theorize as to what it really is.

Maybe you have time management tools; software, a special app, or at the very least, the trusty standby; a calendar. You make prioritized to-do lists, set alarms and reminders and create detailed schedules to hedge your bets against the perpetual march of time. Although they may help us structure our lives and more effectively respond to time’s demands on our lives, they fall short without a clear appreciation of our greatest threat to our relationship with time………procrastination.

We have all had periods of procrastination that render us helpless. For a variety of reasons, we remain still, ineffectual, and anxious while time ever marches on. This is the conundrum. How can we make the most of something we seem to not ever have enough of? Here’s some ways that you can make time your friend while avoiding procrastination.

1.    Follow the Age-old Adage that “Time is Money.”

Financial experts will tell you that money that is available to you at the present time is worth more than the same amount in the future due to its earning potential. If you can think of available time in the same way you think of your money you will begin to appreciate it more as an opportunity rather than something fleeting and about to be lost. Consider each moment where you desire to be productive as more valuable than future moments and you will begin to seek out more present opportunities to invest your best efforts towards productivity.

2.    Avoid the Multitasking Mistake

Our modern world is full of distractions. We are surrounded by technologies that vie for our attention. We believe that we can answer emails, watch TV, post to our social media accounts and somehow work on a primary task effectively. We really can’t. Our brains don’t work that way. We are basically asking it to split our focus and attention between multiple tasks at once leading to cognitive overload and stress. A recent study even found that multitaskers eventually end up with lower density in cognitive areas of the brain. Create a space where you can concentrate on one thing at a time, shut off competing devices and distractions and  reap the productive benefits the “myth” of multitasking has robbed you of in the past.

3.    How to “Eat an Elephant”

The greater the task, the more we tend to put it off. Imagine an author sitting down to write a lengthy novel. Staring at a blank page with the entirety of that goal looming can produce anxiety (believe me, I know). But if you break up your large projects into manageable portions it begins to feel more reasonable. Hemmingway shared that when he felt overwhelmed he would just aim to “write one true sentence, and then go on from there.” How do you eat an elephant? It’s easy, one bite at a time. Break large tasks into smaller pieces and you’ll find that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

4.    Tracking Time to Control It

Often we feel that we are forever at the mercy of time. We cannot add hours to the day. But by recognizing when “the right time” to perform a certain task is or what “time-traps” are affecting your productivity you can begin to take back control over the clock. This can be a simple as keeping a short journal where you record exactly how you spent your time throughout the day. More importantly, note how you feel while completing each task. Where you productive? What was your energy level? Where you interrupted or distracted in any way? This will help you to recognize paths to improvement just as knowing how your money is spent can help you be a better steward of it.

5.    Spend Time “Sharpening Your Axe”

Planning can go a long way toward your overall effectiveness. It may seem counterintuitive to spend extra time constructing elaborate to-do lists or extensive schedules but studies have shown that for every one minute you spend in planning rewards you with a ten minute gain in execution. Abraham Lincoln didn’t need some white lab-coat to make sense of this. He once said, “If I had 60 minutes to cut down a tree, I would spend 40 minutes sharpening the ax and 20 minutes cutting it down.” Planning is the difference between just reacting to life’s time challenges and actively making the most effective use of it.

6.    “Eat the Frog” First

We have all heard of the importance of prioritizing tasks in order to improve our effectiveness. This is usually fairly simple. We are just determining which are most important, time-sensitive, or otherwise urgent and we intend to perform those first. A productive day is not one that in which you have checked off ALL items on your list, it’s one that you have completed the urgent items that, if left undone turn to crises. Follow Mark Twain’s advice, “If you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of your day will be wonderful.” Make the effort to get that task out of the way that is most urgent, maybe unpleasant, but disastrous if ignored. Find your “frog” and eat it.

We may never really know what time is, however, we don’t have to be learned physicists or philosophical thinkers to understand its importance in our everyday lives. We can begin to appreciate what it means to us personally and how we can manage it to help our productivity, stress levels, and over all well-being. Maybe it’s both complicated and simple at the same time. Even Albert Einstein, who probably did more towards furthering our understanding of time once quipped, “Time is what clocks measure.” Just thinking about our own relationship with time will reveal to us its precious nature. Spend it wisely whether at work or with your family and friends savoring the present lest it become the seed of some regret.

Daniel Williamson

January 26, 2017