Just Passing the Time

Many people seem to think ‘time’ is some sort of resource.

They talk about managing it, using it, saving it, losing and gaining it, even ‘keeping’ it.

Great emphasis in personal and business development training is put on the idea of ‘Time Management’.

There are Time Management products and books. I was once sent on a three-day course about how I should ‘manage’ my time.

And there’s another thing – the idea we in some way ‘posses’ time!

All this would make sense if time were indeed a resource – but it isn’t.

You see, a resource is something you can use, something you can use up, something you can choose to not use.

Like the fuel in the tank in your car. When you’re travelling, you’re using it and might even use it up and have to get some more, or, your car is parked and you’re not using that particular resource.

But time is NOT a resource.

Why?

Because you cannot not use it – in fact, you don’t even use it either.

Despite what you may say, time does not, cannot, ‘run out’ – unlike the fuel in your tank.

The thing is, you and I cannot ‘not use’ time. We cannot put time ‘on hold’, save it for another day or ‘manage’ it.

Managing one’s resources means deciding to use more or less of it at any time for any purpose – like turning the heating up, or down.

You and I cannot make time go faster or slower, we can’t use more or less of it for any purpose.

But we continue to run our lives on this idea of time – because that’s all it is, an idea, a concept derived from the rotation of the planet and it’s orbit around the sun.

Time does not exist – it’s only a measure we use to relate one event in our lives to another – to determine how ‘big’ one event is compared with another.

Or, like measuring the length of a piece of string, how ‘long’ each event takes in terms of our measuring stick of hours, minutes and seconds.

That’s all ‘time’ is – a measuring stick.

Our lives, yours and mine, are a sequence of events taking place one after another, one before another.

Even if we’re ‘multitasking’ we’re still in a sequence of events, even if that’s just watching the kettle boil. Just one event after another after another and so on.

Certainly, we can do things in parallel, but we are still switching from one event to another in a series of infinitely small ‘micro-events’

Reading this or watching the video is an event but just think for a moment about what other events you turn your mind to while doing so.

I’m doing lots of other little things while I’m writing this, taking a sip of my coffee for example.

You and I cannot manage ‘time’, but we can manage the sequence of events we go through, and we can plan ‘when’ – in relation to the daily planetary rotation and its orbit around the sun – those events take place.

Time passes – time is happening all the time – but events don’t ‘take’ time –there’s nowhere to ‘take’ it from.

After all we can’t ‘put time back’ if we decide not to ‘use’ it – which is what we’d do with a real resource.

Don’t let ‘time’ manage your life, don’t run your life ‘by the clock’.

You can’t ‘exchange time for money’. If you’re in that paradigm what you’re really doing is getting paid for carrying out a particular sequence of events.

Manage your sequence of events, not time.