What's the Rush?
A recurring thought recently found its way into my consciousness. The subject of this familiar thought is how the measurement of time has impacted society. Those of you who have read my book, "Avoiding the Blues", know some of my thoughts on this subject and how time has had an impact on my life.
Time management has become an ever more important skill for human beings. The slice of time we use to measure it has diminished from from years and months, through days and hours, on to minutes and seconds and, finally today, to nano and pico seconds. As a result we now have potentially more and more items that need to be managed in a day. More and more bits of data compete for these ever smaller slices and, because we are now able to measure and schedule time in smaller units, we allow more of these disparate items to enter our days. We feel a need to manage more and more into the finite number of twenty-four hours.
To do this, successfully, we need to all become good managers of time and of schedule - of OUR schedule. Of all the tasks that we time managers must perfect, the most important is to determine which items to allow into our days. The Catch-22 is that we seem to allocate less and less time to this task as other, less important, tasks run us over in a consistent and automated - robotic - fashion. So we wake up and let the day take us over. We let externalities take over and run the day.
And so.....to how the thought came to me once again.
Last week I watched, and heard, the reaction of commuters to the inability of trains to keep to a schedule in Montreal. You see winter hit Montreal during this first week of December. A storm made a surprise appearance and dumped 25 cm of snow on the city. For the weeks leading up to this inevitable yearly event I had been warned by long-time commuters that the result would be delays, cancellations and chaos.
I will surely write a blog entry about the subject of how an annual event somehow always results in the same behaviour and results from the participants of the charade (the operator and its customers). I can easily let myself get taken into the trap and criticize the operator - I most certainly do - but today's entry is not about this. Rather it is about coping with the ensuing chaos.
So why do we care about a late train? What is the rush? Why the stress, the arguments, the yelling, the worry? Simple....we have a schedule to keep to. If I don't make it to work for 8 a.m. I will be late for a call that I have with peers in Asia or Europe. They'll either be waiting for me, cancel the call or they'll proceed and I will miss out on the exchange of information and ideas that occurs. The stress that I feel is that I am going to be late. Late for a scheduled event. Late for the doctor, the bus connection, the drink after work, the appointment at lunch, the next meeting, the deadline. The this. The that.
How much more calm it might all be if we were not told the train would arrive at precisely 7:04 a.m.? What if we did not have a meeting that started at 8:00 a.m.
When I was a child I was an airplane fanatic. I'd pick up airline schedules and dream of flying planes to the different destinations listed. It used to be that the flights arrived in increments of five minutes. Schedules did not state that a plane landed at 8:09 a.m. It landed at 8:10 a.m. Today it lands at 8:08 or 8:11 a.m. I remember my mother and I thinking how ridiculous it was that airlines had decided to make this scheduling change. Were they attempting to show us the level of precision they operated under? A perception that the airline had orchestrated its flight schedules perfectly and with clock-work precision and repetition? What caused us to need to save that minute? We mocked the airlines then for trying to be so precise. Today we bitch when the flights are minutes late pushing back from the departure gate.
Have we in fact saved a few precious minutes? Or are we living in some sort of time machine induced state of high-expectations that can only be met rarely. Slow down, care less about your schedule, schedule more free time into your days.
Live your life.
All your friends, colleagues and fellow commuters will breath a sigh of relief as your complaining diminishes.
Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!
Time management has become an ever more important skill for human beings. The slice of time we use to measure it has diminished from from years and months, through days and hours, on to minutes and seconds and, finally today, to nano and pico seconds. As a result we now have potentially more and more items that need to be managed in a day. More and more bits of data compete for these ever smaller slices and, because we are now able to measure and schedule time in smaller units, we allow more of these disparate items to enter our days. We feel a need to manage more and more into the finite number of twenty-four hours.
To do this, successfully, we need to all become good managers of time and of schedule - of OUR schedule. Of all the tasks that we time managers must perfect, the most important is to determine which items to allow into our days. The Catch-22 is that we seem to allocate less and less time to this task as other, less important, tasks run us over in a consistent and automated - robotic - fashion. So we wake up and let the day take us over. We let externalities take over and run the day.
And so.....to how the thought came to me once again.
Last week I watched, and heard, the reaction of commuters to the inability of trains to keep to a schedule in Montreal. You see winter hit Montreal during this first week of December. A storm made a surprise appearance and dumped 25 cm of snow on the city. For the weeks leading up to this inevitable yearly event I had been warned by long-time commuters that the result would be delays, cancellations and chaos.
I will surely write a blog entry about the subject of how an annual event somehow always results in the same behaviour and results from the participants of the charade (the operator and its customers). I can easily let myself get taken into the trap and criticize the operator - I most certainly do - but today's entry is not about this. Rather it is about coping with the ensuing chaos.
So why do we care about a late train? What is the rush? Why the stress, the arguments, the yelling, the worry? Simple....we have a schedule to keep to. If I don't make it to work for 8 a.m. I will be late for a call that I have with peers in Asia or Europe. They'll either be waiting for me, cancel the call or they'll proceed and I will miss out on the exchange of information and ideas that occurs. The stress that I feel is that I am going to be late. Late for a scheduled event. Late for the doctor, the bus connection, the drink after work, the appointment at lunch, the next meeting, the deadline. The this. The that.
How much more calm it might all be if we were not told the train would arrive at precisely 7:04 a.m.? What if we did not have a meeting that started at 8:00 a.m.
When I was a child I was an airplane fanatic. I'd pick up airline schedules and dream of flying planes to the different destinations listed. It used to be that the flights arrived in increments of five minutes. Schedules did not state that a plane landed at 8:09 a.m. It landed at 8:10 a.m. Today it lands at 8:08 or 8:11 a.m. I remember my mother and I thinking how ridiculous it was that airlines had decided to make this scheduling change. Were they attempting to show us the level of precision they operated under? A perception that the airline had orchestrated its flight schedules perfectly and with clock-work precision and repetition? What caused us to need to save that minute? We mocked the airlines then for trying to be so precise. Today we bitch when the flights are minutes late pushing back from the departure gate.
Have we in fact saved a few precious minutes? Or are we living in some sort of time machine induced state of high-expectations that can only be met rarely. Slow down, care less about your schedule, schedule more free time into your days.
Live your life.
All your friends, colleagues and fellow commuters will breath a sigh of relief as your complaining diminishes.
Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!
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