Timey Time Time
Written on February 9, 2010
Wherefore art thou, Time?
A little classic literature today. Aren’t we all looking out the balcony longing for a little more time? But Romeo and Juliet is just so… sappy idealized. I like the practicality of Mr. Micawber.
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” — Mr Micawber (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield)
Does this work for time? I think it does – in two ways.
The first way is punctuality. This is a bold statement, coming as it does from a procrastinator.
It’s not fun living a perpetual five minutes (or 10, or 15) behind the times. Eternally chasing deadlines is a sucker’s game. So why am I so good at it?
I have a funny relationship with procrastination.
- On the one hand, looking at the hard evidence, we are on the best of terms. We spend lots of time together. The love is flowing.
- On the other hand, I can’t think of another thing off-hand that has caused me so much unhappiness for so little reward.
There’s an outrageous disconnect here.
The second way the rule applies is with regards to volume. What happens when you try to fit 800 blocks of time in a 672 block schedule?
673 blocks? 671 blocks?
I tend to get frustrated when I can’t do things that I want to do. At the same time, I have a great quantity of things that I want to do, but I never seem to have the time. I also, looking at the evidence, have a number of things that I currently do which hog the slots.
Video games, for example, have a terrible time/value trade-off. Dragon Age is the first video game I’ve played in a long time, and while it is a fantastic game, it’s a time eater. It’s impossible to play in small doses – it’s the book equivalent of a page turner.
Which is great, except for the whole “other things I want to do” and “limited time slot” problems.
Filed in: personalinthepubliceye.
There’s a lot of truth to this, though when I was working and felt very much the same way, I think the limiting factor was often a lack of mental energy as much as a lack of time. The reason why I ended up doing things I didn’t value very much vs the things I was always wishing I ‘had time for’ was that the random stuff – fluffy literature, t.v., napping – didn’t require thought and the other stuff did. Right now that seems to be the case too – my frustration is not lack of time, but lack of opportunity to concentrate.
True enough. There are lots of programming activities/projects that I would love to work on, but the ‘quality’ of time I have in the evenings doesn’t really support them.
I’m a morning person, so my work benefits from my alert/sharp hours.
Of course, it’s hard to measure how I would respond if I managed to get engaged in an activity, even late. The difficulty is, as with everything, in getting started.
@”we are on the best of terms. We spend lots of time together. The love is flowing.”
There’s more than one way to spend time together:
http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/Dixon/dixon01_13.htm
Great link! Some kind of communion is the kind of communion that communion’s all about.