“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” – Albert Einstein
I am sure every day you hear at least one person say, “How fast is time flying” or “I can’t find the time to do the things I want to do.”
The clock keeps ticking at its own steady pace, but our perception of time keeps changing. Time is nothing but perception. If time is a result of our perception, then it can be said that it is our perception that makes us think that we are short of time. If that is so, then we can easily find time in our lives by merely changing the way we perceive time.
Would you agree with that line of reasoning?
Whether you agree, or not, I would exhort you to stay with me and continue reading.
One undeniable property of time is that it passes. But how fast, or slow, is what we decide with our attitude. One factor that defines our perception of time is the number of things we do with the time we have. I have tried to represent the relationship between time and the number of things we do in the image below:
If we are doing nothing with our time, then, of course, time flies. When time has passed we look back and realise that we did nothing, and it is no wonder we say, “Time just flew by.”
But as we begin do more things, we begin to mark the timeline with the things we have achieved. We can look back with pride and tell ourselves, and others, that this is what we did with our time. The more things we do, the more time we seem to have, because we are able to do all that we planned to do in the time we had. The sense of achievement makes us feel that we have utilised our time well.
But this does not go on forever.
If we commit to doing too many things then our efforts to do the many things will affect our performance of them. In the end, we will find that we are not able to do as many things as we had planned to do. We begin to feel that we don’t have enough time. If we don’t take stock now, but continue to increase the number of things to do, we will begin to miss more and more deadlines, and quite a few things will remain unfinished. We will reach a point where we may begin to feel that we don’t have time to do anything at all.
Of course, the above view simplifies the concept of time, but I strongly feel that we can maximise and optimise our usage of time if we understand our capabilities better and plan to achieve the ideal number of things that we can in a given period of time.
Wouldn’t you agree?
(Image1 Courtesy: satty4u from sxc.hu)
What do you think?