Time - you got any?

WHY WE NEED TO MAKE THE MOST OF OUR TIME!

The whole concept of time is one we just accept and get on with, but we rarely think about the fundamental nature of time or how we can make the most of the time that we’re given.

We wake up at a certain time, usually dictated by the time we need to get ready to leave for work or to get the kids ready for the school bus.

We have lunch, not because we’re hungry but because we’re told it’s lunchtime.

We follow time with watches, clocks and calendars; and we seem to have become even more obsessed with tracking time than ever.

Remember when we were young? When we went out on our bikes when a friend ‘knocked on’ for us - and only came home when the streetlights came on?

Sometimes we ate some sweets for lunch, sometimes we didn’t eat until we got home. Days were somehow measured from dawn til dusk and everything seemed easy and less rushed.

Fast forward to adult life and ‘there’s never enough hours in the day’. Yet we have the same amount of time we had back then…the difference is we are always chasing the clock.

THE BEGINNING OF TIME AS WE KNOW IT

Time passes by no matter what we do or how much we enjoy it. Yet it’s something that we just can’t study with a microscope or experiment with.

We can’t say what happens when time passes, it’s just represented through change. Change in ourselves and the World around us.

The whole concept of measuring time dates back to the Ancient Egyptians who invented the sun dial some time before 1500 B.C., but they didn’t measure the time the way that we do now. Back then, and for the following 3 millennia their basic unit of time was the period of daylight.

Only until fairly recently, ordinary people didn’t have any way of measuring or telling the time, apart from looking up to sky to see where the sun was. Time didn’t really have much meaning, well not in the way that it does to us.

In an article on time, Keith Devlin explains that there was one exception:

‘The one group in medieval times whose day was ruled by time in a way not unlike people today were the Benedictine monks, with their ecclesiastically regulated prayer times, the eight Canonical Hours: lauds (just before daybreak), prime (just after daybreak), terce (third hour), sext (sixth hour), nones (ninth hour), vespers (eleventh hour), compline (after sunset), and matins (during the night). The signal that announced each canonical hour and regulated the monks' day was a ringing bell. This gives us our word "clock," which comes from the medieval Latin word for bell, clocca.’

There are, of course, various theories about how the 24 hour clock that we know today came to be.

The day being 12 hours long could be because 12 is a factor of 60, and both the Babylonian and Egyptian civilisations recognised a zodiac cycle of 12 constellations.

In classical Greek and Roman times, they used twelve hours from sunrise to sunset; but since Summer days and Winter nights are longer than Winter days and Summer nights, the lengths of the hours varied throughout the year.

Hours did not have a fixed length until the Greeks decided they needed such a system for theoretical calculations.

Hipparchus proposed dividing the day equally into 24 hours which came to be known as equinoctial hours. They are based on 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness on the days of the Equinoxes.

However, ordinary people continued to use seasonally varying hours for a long time. Only with the advent of mechanical clocks in Europe in the 14th Century, did the system we use today become commonly accepted.

THE TIME FOR REFORM

Essentially, time has always been a product of our imagination but it’s also a source of incredible power and has been since Julius Caesar reshuffled the Roman calendar in 46 B.C.E. to insulate it from the priesthood.

In 1929, in a bid to turn ordinary Russians into ‘good communists’, Joseph Stalin abolished weekends because he said they were a ‘bourgeois luxury’.

The way we keep, and track, time nowadays stems back to the end of the 19th Century, a time when we saw great technological progress which linked across borders, continents and oceans.

As Ian B Peacock states: ‘Railways, steamships, subways, telephones, and radio bulldozed their way into our lives which increased the need to do away with the impossible patchwork of local times that existed around the globe.

A universal system was needed and was officially adopted by diplomats at the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C.: a world divided into 24 zones, each with a single mean time determined by astronomers at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

This time reform wasn’t welcomed by all, with many people believing it was an attempt to play God. Challenged and ignored on every continent well into the 20th century, modern timekeeping did not simply emerge; it had to be imposed’.

TIME IS MONEY

As time became a new way of life, so it became more secular with activities separated out into commerce, industry and daily life; these themselves then became broken down into work life and home life and within that time for eating, sleeping and relaxing.  

Today, most of us survive by selling our time - explicitly in the case of workers, professionals, or consultants "paid by the hour," less explicitly but no less real for salaried employees.

Time is money, as they say, and if we have become adept in trading our time for money, do we value it the same way if we’re not working?

As individuals, we’re constantly trying to cram more into our lives. We only have to look at the success of the hundreds of apps and courses promising to get us super organised and uber productive.

From the Pomodoro technique to the 5am club – being busy is now haled as the only way to be successful.

We’re constantly told that we should be constantly hustling, chasing the next dollar, sleep is for wimps, why do you need a lunch hour…but at what cost?

Where is the real value in life if all we do is work, work, work?

That’s not to say working hard should be frowned upon, or that those of us who enjoy the constant graft are wrong – the key word there is enjoy.

Surely enjoyment needs to play a key role…whether it’s enjoying your work, your down time, your family time, your sleep…as we know, time passes whatever we do, and few people lie on their death bed wishing they’d worked more and enjoyed life less.

WHAT IF WE TREATED TIME LIKE WE DO OUR BANK ACCOUNT?

As my Nan, and many others, said ‘time and tide wait for no man’, we may now track time and measure it to the millisecond, the only true proof of time is the change we experience.

What change do you want to see in your life?

Imagine you had ￡86,400 in your bank account and someone stole ￡10 of it.

Would you be upset and throw all of the remaining ￡86,390 away in hopes of getting back at the person who took your ￡10? Or move on and live?

Right, move on and live.

Every day we 86,400 seconds – every single day – don’t let someone’s negative 10 seconds ruin the remaining 86,390. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Life is bigger than that.

The seconds will tick by whether you fill them with smiles or anger, enjoyment or upset…some days it will feel longer, others shorter (you know which will result in which don’t you!)

If you look at the time you have like you do your money, then the change you want in your life may well become achievable.

You get paid and you budget; you know how much your mortgage or rent is, how much your utility bills are, travel, food and other essentials…the rest of the money is free to do what you want with.

How about we look at our time in the same way?

There are certain things we need to do such as work, eat, look after the kids – that time is allocated but what about the rest of the time, what can you do with that.

How can you squeeze every last drop of life out of those hours, minutes and seconds?

And even though we need to do certain things such as work, shouldn’t we make them as enjoyable as possible?

Don’t simply get a job so someone else can live the life you want, do it for yourself. If entrepreneurship isn’t for you, then find a job that you enjoy…that you want to do and, if you’re not qualified to do it, get qualified.

Budget some time to learn, get experience, empower yourself to be the best version of yourself.

The unstoppable you that you were all those years ago, the younger you full of excitement about what you wanted to be when you grew up, the you who went out for that bike ride and dared to dream and didn’t come home til the street lights went on. 

Yes, we all have responsibilities that take up our time just like the bills take up some of our money…but why not try to find a little extra both for fun and to invest in your future.

You might find that you’re far more productive and far less stressed than you ever were before!