Learning Time Management Skills? Start with Learning why Time Flies
About the first thing, you learn from reading any course on time management skills is generally that you need to be aware of the passage of time. Invariably, they tell you how when you are doing something, you like,time seems to pass really quickly and how when you’re at work, and you hate it. Time seems to pass very slowly. However, is that really an adequate explanation, of how we perceive time?
The thing is, it is not really true that time passes slowly when you’re at work, and you aren’t really involved in it. People who don’t specially feel attached to their line of work will just as frequently report that their days simply seem to vanish. When most people discuss how they just don’t seem to have sufficient time (busy mothers say this often), you don’t imagine that they find running after over-energetic toddlers while feeling sleep-deprived from three years of no sleep is something they actually enjoy, do you? People who do nothing, but a couple of errands on a Sunday find that it’s time to go to bed before they know it too.
So, learning time management skills is not just about finding a way to be interested in your work. It’s to understand how time actually passes.
Conventional ideas about the passage of time in time management skills, do very well explaining how time passes when we are deeply bored or when we are profoundly involved in something. What it doesn’t do is to help us understand how we can do things that don’t really mean much to us – things that are neither deeply boring nor utterly interesting – and still find that time flies. The reason it happens this way is that there are some inexplicable rules about how the brain processes time. Here are some of them.
A few things can completely upset our sense of how time passes – if a person has a five-second seizure, for example, they’ll invariably say that the seizure lasted approximately 45 minutes. People who take recreational drugs report all kinds of unpredictable things occurring to their perception of time besides. The older you are, the faster the clock in your head ticks. People oftentimes wonder sadly at how their years seem to slip by far more rapidly than they ever did when they were younger. It is not just in their imagination. Our perception of the passage of time really does speed up as we age. You should probably think about time as an actual clock that ticks within your head. If you pay attention to how precisely it’s ticking, you become very aware of how much the time exactly has passed. If you involve yourself in other things and neglect to pay attention to how time is passing, you’re not aware of it – whether or not what you do is boring.
The warmer you are,the faster time seems to pass (to a degree, of course). Our perception of time may be crucial to our time management skills. However, scientists don’t really understand what exactly happens in the brain. There’s just one thing they know: if you wish to have your days last longer so that you can make the best use of them, you need to start being aware of how every minute pass.
I totally agree with your thoughts that the self-perception of time changes with a person’s age. When I was 9 years of age, our summer school holidays lasted for 6 weeks during July and August. Compared to nowadays, these vacations seemed to last forever. We seemed to have achieved so much in such a short period. Roughly speaking, I’d say that time seems to pass about four times quicker as you enter middle-age. That could be why I always correct my initial estimate of how long a task will take. For example, I may initially guess that it will take me 6 hours to trim my 100 metres of conifers 3 metres high. I always multiply my initial estimate by 4 to get a more realistic estimate. Or is it that I’m not as fit as I was, 20 years ago?
To be honest, I wonder about that to myself. Since I feel that I am still fitted as I used to be but time seems to go by faster in everyday I have passed. From what I’ve read in psychological point of view, I think we need to take the advantage by learning a new unique experience everyday. When we do the same thing or more like a routine activity, time seems to fly by. Another factor, when we were children, we get more focused in the “now” or present moment, but as we aged everything seems to be different about how we perceive time going through our activity and process in life because we have more complex thought in our brain. There is a suggestion about focusing on positive (rather than negative) memories, trying to live more in the present, and holding a positive perception of the future – envisioning a future full of hope and optimism.