Time Stand Still…
Time is a fluid you can never hold on to.
Time…
Many have tried to describe it, scientists still struggle reconciling it in the laboratory, Einstein found that it could not be separated from the very space around us, yet none of us really have a handle on what it is.
We say that time is money, time is life, memory is going back in time…
Most of us would rather even not face the realities Time places in front if us, yet routinely we:
- Waste Time
- Kill Time
- Save Time
- Spend Time
- Run out of Time…
That last one is the kicker. We all eventually run out of time, almost as if we are walking around with a count-down timer above our heads that one day, maybe even today, will reach zero… and then?
We look at pictures of ourselves or our kids and see how quickly they or we have changed, and as we get older each moment becomes a smaller part of our total memory, making the time we have left seem like it is passing ever faster. We remember our grandparents telling us how much we have grown each time they saw us… to us it seemed silly until we saw our own kids or grand-kids grow so very fast.
No understanding of achievement or success would be complete without a fairly decent discussion of time and what we know and don’t know about it. We need to understand how we can get the most out of every moment, as some sage said: “To squeeze every drop out of each moment.”
As the picture above demonstrates, time is something we are forced to spend, that we can never ultimately save, and that goes by at the same rate for every person (my apologies to Einstein here, as we are not talking about the Theory of Relativity). So how can we use our time effectively?
You may have heard the analogy that compares life to a box. The box holds a certain total volume – that is the sum total of your time. Events, the things we do, the moments or hours we spend are spherical balls which we can place in our box, each taking up some portion of our total time. Big events such as “a semester in college” might be compared to bowling balls. Smaller events such as “a week at the beach” might be compared to a baseball. Perhaps spending a day at work could be compared to a marble.
Eventually we fill our box, but wait! There is still spaces between those bowling balls and base-balls and marbles. There are moments between various tasks that may go wasted. What about the time you spend in your car going to and from work, do you use that time for anything? Or do you just listen to music or scream at the person who just cut you off in traffic? Could you get some books on disk or MP3, or a course in something like a new language or a success strategy? Those moments could be compared to BB’s (those tiny little copper balls used in pellet guns). You could still put a whole bunch of those in that box.
But can we go further? What about all the spaces between the BB’s, and Marbles, and Baseballs, and Bowling Balls? Are there little bits of moments that go wasted where you could write down ideas on a note-pad, or just hug your wife or child for no reason at all – but just to tell them you love them? The analogy of the box goes on to say we can put grains of sand in the box, and then finally fill the box with water to fill in all the rest of the space.
So we too should try to observe how we utilize our time and then how we may fill those moments with things that help us squeeze the most out of it – even if that is just sitting at the beach, holding the hand of the one you love and listening to the waves pound the shore. That is living.
Remember, those moments will never occur again, they exist only in your memory and the mind of God. If you let them go by without ever using them, they will still be spent, but they will be empty and wasted.
How might we use our time most effectively? Here are a few ideas you can try to help you recapture the moments that, up to now, you have been wasting:
- As mentioned before, get a notepad and short pen/pencil that you can carry with you to capture ideas. This also helps you get those ideas down before they simply disappear, never to be heard from again…
- Get some form of planner, whether it be a phone app, a Day-Timer, a software tool, etc. and use it to track what you are doing so you can keep your tasks “Top-Of-Mind” and get them done.
- Learn how to prioritize your tasks, learn the four “Ds”: Do, Delay, Delegate, Dump and apply them to the four quadrants of the “Priority Matrix” (see my earlier post about the priority matrix here).
- Spend some time thinking deeply about what is most important to you, what you would do if you only had one day left to live – because you do only have one day left to live – Today. You “might” have tomorrow, but you are not guaranteed it, you might die tonight, you simply have no knowledge of how long you live, so if you live as if you only have a day, one day you will be right. And you will have done the things that mattered most instead of dying with regret.
Time requires our careful management, and despite the fact it does not act like any other resource we have, we still must treat it with the utmost respect for it is the raw material all of our life is made from.
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David T. McKee
