Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, you fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Here's a very interesting notion I came across while skimming through the time management section in The Nerdist Way:
You can't control time in a Doctor Who fashion, jumping forward and back, across dimensions, doing really cool things
with a flying police box (damn, I WISH!!!). But you can control the SPEED of time. Not absolute time, but relative time. I
believe the latter matters as much, if not more than the former.
How many of your friends have said to you recently, "Man, This year has just FLOWN by! What the hell happened??"
The last few years seem to have moved at an unbelievable pace, to the point where it feels difficult to grasp sometimes. So
what DID happen? Did the space-time continuum start going to universe raves and doing meth? That would be rad. The more
likely answer is that technology happened. The dawn of the smartphone era happened. Once Apple changed the game and
everyone else followed suit, we became a culture of beings with fully functioning web-enabled devices. At any given moment,
we have access to the sum total of human knowledge. Though I do occasionally Google things like "What did Julius Caesar
eat for breakfast?" while waiting in a long line, I'm more apt to check Facebook requests, check Twitter, or tweet something
snarky about how long the line is.
It's web access and social networking. If a watched kettle never boils then I promise it only takes a second while you're
checking Stephen Fry's status updates (which are unendingly delightful, BTW). The constant distraction of being connected
is robbing us of our time. More specifically, it's robbing our AWARENESS of time. Ultimately, if an hour feels like ten minutes,
isn't that important? What good is an hour if you lack the awareness to experience it? I can recount numerous times in 2010
when I was playing Fieldrunners and realized, "Well, whaddaya know? I've been doing this for three hours."
Concentrated game blocks aren't the enemy, but filling every available minute connected to a computing device in some
way can be. Notice how, when you start downloading a file, you get an "estimated time remaining"? How often is it accurate
to absolute time? Almost never. It may jump from "an hour remaining to "4 minutes remaining" and everywhere in between.
This is due to a variety of factors, naturally, like connection speed, traffic on the server in your area, and traffic on the server
from which you're downloading the file. The point is that web time is intrinsically distorted, and it has interesting parallels
with how we perceive time while connected to it.
I'm not recommending a total freeze. If you want time to go faster, by all means distract yourself at all times. Your life will
soar by. Just know, though, that if you feel compelled to always be distracted you might be avoiding something emotionally,
and you might want to have a chat or several with a therapist. It's humanly counterintuitive to wish your life to expire faster.
On the contrary, if you want to feel time crawl, go live in a cabin for a month with no technology. Or get arrested and go to
jail. Ya see, prison could actually FREE you from your self-constructed TIME PRISON in a flippity-floppity twist at the end
and blah blah blah M. Night Shyamalan.
While pursuing your goal of time-lordery, you shouldn't have to take one or the other extreme, but as long as you know
that you can extend the sensation of time by unplugging at regular intervals and simply becoming more AWARE of it, you
shouldn't feel as cheated of your minutes and hours when popular social markers like "New Year's Eve" or "my fucking birthday"
come around. Be mindful to inject some nuggets of quality into your time to enhance its value.
Now, I do not, in fact, possess a smartphone, and I have actively avoided them. That being said, I am not at ALL immune to the pull of teh beloved intarwebz. I spend a metric fuckton of time online, mostly doing what basically amounts to jack shit. Spending hours reading old Penny Arcade strips, watching youtube, posting on message boards, checking news sites and blogs and whatnot, I believe, qualifies. And that's just at HOME. So if you can imagine that compounded by a smartphone, I'd be quite well and truly fucked and the Matrix will have swallowed me whole.
So, tomorrow, I'm going to do just that. And I'll keep doing it every two or three days, just as an experiment. This will, I expect be easier said than done, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. I'll let you know how this goes.
Aloha, peoples.
You can't control time in a Doctor Who fashion, jumping forward and back, across dimensions, doing really cool things
with a flying police box (damn, I WISH!!!). But you can control the SPEED of time. Not absolute time, but relative time. I
believe the latter matters as much, if not more than the former.
How many of your friends have said to you recently, "Man, This year has just FLOWN by! What the hell happened??"
The last few years seem to have moved at an unbelievable pace, to the point where it feels difficult to grasp sometimes. So
what DID happen? Did the space-time continuum start going to universe raves and doing meth? That would be rad. The more
likely answer is that technology happened. The dawn of the smartphone era happened. Once Apple changed the game and
everyone else followed suit, we became a culture of beings with fully functioning web-enabled devices. At any given moment,
we have access to the sum total of human knowledge. Though I do occasionally Google things like "What did Julius Caesar
eat for breakfast?" while waiting in a long line, I'm more apt to check Facebook requests, check Twitter, or tweet something
snarky about how long the line is.
It's web access and social networking. If a watched kettle never boils then I promise it only takes a second while you're
checking Stephen Fry's status updates (which are unendingly delightful, BTW). The constant distraction of being connected
is robbing us of our time. More specifically, it's robbing our AWARENESS of time. Ultimately, if an hour feels like ten minutes,
isn't that important? What good is an hour if you lack the awareness to experience it? I can recount numerous times in 2010
when I was playing Fieldrunners and realized, "Well, whaddaya know? I've been doing this for three hours."
Concentrated game blocks aren't the enemy, but filling every available minute connected to a computing device in some
way can be. Notice how, when you start downloading a file, you get an "estimated time remaining"? How often is it accurate
to absolute time? Almost never. It may jump from "an hour remaining to "4 minutes remaining" and everywhere in between.
This is due to a variety of factors, naturally, like connection speed, traffic on the server in your area, and traffic on the server
from which you're downloading the file. The point is that web time is intrinsically distorted, and it has interesting parallels
with how we perceive time while connected to it.
I'm not recommending a total freeze. If you want time to go faster, by all means distract yourself at all times. Your life will
soar by. Just know, though, that if you feel compelled to always be distracted you might be avoiding something emotionally,
and you might want to have a chat or several with a therapist. It's humanly counterintuitive to wish your life to expire faster.
On the contrary, if you want to feel time crawl, go live in a cabin for a month with no technology. Or get arrested and go to
jail. Ya see, prison could actually FREE you from your self-constructed TIME PRISON in a flippity-floppity twist at the end
and blah blah blah M. Night Shyamalan.
While pursuing your goal of time-lordery, you shouldn't have to take one or the other extreme, but as long as you know
that you can extend the sensation of time by unplugging at regular intervals and simply becoming more AWARE of it, you
shouldn't feel as cheated of your minutes and hours when popular social markers like "New Year's Eve" or "my fucking birthday"
come around. Be mindful to inject some nuggets of quality into your time to enhance its value.
Now, I do not, in fact, possess a smartphone, and I have actively avoided them. That being said, I am not at ALL immune to the pull of teh beloved intarwebz. I spend a metric fuckton of time online, mostly doing what basically amounts to jack shit. Spending hours reading old Penny Arcade strips, watching youtube, posting on message boards, checking news sites and blogs and whatnot, I believe, qualifies. And that's just at HOME. So if you can imagine that compounded by a smartphone, I'd be quite well and truly fucked and the Matrix will have swallowed me whole.
So, tomorrow, I'm going to do just that. And I'll keep doing it every two or three days, just as an experiment. This will, I expect be easier said than done, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. I'll let you know how this goes.
Aloha, peoples.