I’m someone who believes in time management. That’s actually a misnomer in a sense because you can’t really manage time. Time is simply a human construction. Humans are incredibly great at creating concepts that allow us to be able to hold in common certain concepts so that we can be able to use those concepts in common. Time is one of those. Time allows us to have some standardization of a day so that society can function in a more effective and efficient manner. Time has always existed. Even the earliest of humans understood the difference between daylight and darkness in the day. They understood the daily cycles and eventually they understood the monthly cycles and eventually they understood the yearly cycles. I know it’s difficult but imagine, if you will, being someone who simply existed much like all of the other mammals on the planet and went around foraging for food and hoping to find a little shelter. Time would be irrelevant.

We didn’t actually standardize time until we had to act as units, that is, larger numbers of people, coordinating activity. Intertribal warfare was Probably the first real occurance of people coordinating time. I would guess that people who were planning on attacking other groups of people would tend to want to coordinate the time of day in which they did that. In my opinion, the best time of day, if you are a nomadic civilization, would be when the other group was sleeping. The night raid if you will.

Mass standardization of time came along with the advent of mass transportation. Railroads are the classic example of the standardization of time for really large groups of people. Before that it was the workplace that expected people to be there at a particular time of day. The clock, of course, goes back as far as a sundial. Who knows how early in early civilization the sundial existed. It was certainly before the written word. It is believed that the written word started some 5-6,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East and was initially done with clay tablets. We don’t have any evidence of anything prior to that but I’m sure there was some kind of symbolic meaning left laying around in various places. Religious or communal gatherings seem to have occurred prior, significantly prior, to that time. There is evidence that this happened. It is thought that these communal gatherings happened for some particular reason, although there’s no definitive evidence as to why they happened.

Today, in the modern age, whatever that means, we standardize time to the millisecond. Why would anybody want to know what a thousandth of a second is all about? When I first started programming computers, we would input our punch cards into a punch card reader and the reader would absorb them and the computer program they represented would happen at some remote location known as the computer center. It would not be until the next day that we learned whether our job was successful or not, that is, the computer program actually ran properly, until the output was brought to the local computer center from the main computer center and you could actually read whether or not your job ran and ran properly without errors. For those of you who utilize a smartphone, I’m absolutely certain that you have no concept of what I’m talking about. You, probably, understand the term millisecond. I’m making a comment about my early days as a computer programmer primarily because of the cost of computer usage during that time. When we received our computer output during those days it would tell you that your computer program ran in a time such as 0.0000675 seconds. This tiny fraction of a second was meaningful because computer usage time, back in those days, was billed at $600 an hour on a mainframe. It was simply there for accounting reasons. Today we’re really in the milliseconds. That’s more because of computers than anything else. My own mind doesn’t deal very effectively with a thousandth of a second. It’s not a meaningful slice of time in my world. At least not very often.

But my mind does, overall, deal rather well with time. Time has been a significant issue in my life since I was a young man. I had to get up and go to school. Eventually, I would have to show up at work at a particular time. Time has been with me, forever. Literally. I never really understood it until I started having to be somewhere at a particular time which is when I started school. I adapted rather well to time. I was good at it. I showed up on time, most of the time, actually the vast majority of the time for the vast majority of my life, I have not consistently been what I like to refer to as a slacker, that is someone who doesn’t respect society. I think society is a relatively good thing and I’m not really into bending the rules of society to an extreme for extreme periods of time. There have of course been times in my life when I was not the most steadfast and firm of character of individuals that you could meet. I have not only been something of a slacker during my youth, but could have been characterized as something of a very naive and untrained disciple of Sal Paradise. This served me quite well in my youth, when it was a somewhat acceptable, if not actually appropriate, or at least semi-acceptable form of behavior. But I would eventually come under the spell that the vast majority of my generation came under, the maturation into adulthood and the corresponding change of the attitudes and values of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s. C’est la vie.

I think it was marriage and children in my late twenties that brought me into significantly focusing on time. The economic and time pressures that a family brings on are considerable. Some of us do well with it and others don’t. There is no solution to the problem. As long as you have a spouse and children, the issue of sustenance and shelter and at least some vague understanding of what keeping up with the Jones family means is always floating around somewhere in your mind whether consciously or subconsciously. Time is really and unquestionably your most valuable asset. It’s actually, in absolute terms, the only thing you really ever have. Everything else is simply temporary. If you aren’t cognizant of the moment, you aren’t really here. It is a moment by moment reality in which we find ourselves. It is the nature of our reality to be brought into physical manifestation, mature, and eventually pass from organic to inorganic like every other form of life on this planet. We live in a world of moments. Your life is how you live those moments.

The most successful of human beings use those moments to create, through their behavior, a persona that society considers to be successful. Now you can also be an individual who believes they are successful, regardless of what society thinks, but if you want to get an opinion other than your own as to whether you are successful or not, you have to look at how individuals, society in general, or the media in particular, portray you to others. Can you be successful without other people thinking you are? Yes, of course. There’s no doubt about that. There are who-knows-how-many individuals that meet the criteria that society sets up to be considered successful. They don’t need anyone else to think they’re successful. They can, in and of themselves, set standards for their success and if they meet those standards they can certainly be considered to be successful, at least on their own terms. Success isn’t about reality, it’s about the opinion of what’s real. That’s sort of what all emotional concepts are all about. It’s how you feel about them, it’s how you interpret them that gives them their significance.

Time, is simply what you use to live out your life. You don’t actually have to use it. It exists without you. It is, of course, all the moments of your life. It is what you do in those moments that actually constitute your life.

Today, as I’m in my seventh decade on this planet, I’ve come to the conclusion that enjoying life is the best you can possibly do while you’re on this planet. There are a bazillion ways to enjoy life. I found quite a few of them. Simply being alive is the most fundamental of them. Just simply appreciating being alive is really a good thing. My own opinion is it’s better than not appreciating it or wishing it would end. Yes, there can be times when life becomes unbearable. I’ve seen a couple. I’ve envisioned a few more. But on the whole, even during those stressful times, I’ve seen some value in those moments. I’ve learned. I’ve laughed. I’ve cried. I’ve dreamed. But most of all I’ve simply experienced. It’s time. It has to be filled somehow, even if that somehow is simply meditating your way into nothing at all. There’s all kinds of things you can do with your time.

Today, I like to write about things. Why? Because I just enjoy writing about them. I’d like to tell people that life is, essentially, a good thing. Enjoy it. Even the work day, of which I’ve had more than a few, were some of my best memories. I’ve been extremely lucky in that regard. I certainly enjoyed all the times I’ve played, that is I’ve done things that weren’t necessarily constructive. But I’ve also enjoyed those times when I’ve worked and a lot of the moments of my time these days are spent reflecting on what’s meaningful and what’s been meaningful in my own life. All of those moments are actually meaningful. They constitute a life. Time is a great thing and eventually I’m going to get around to writing on the topic of time management because managing your time, which is essentially a misnomer, is essential to many aspects of your life. You can create a life where you can be considered successful even if no one else agrees with that opinion. The great thing about success is how you define it and in particular how you define it for yourself. The great thing about time is when taken in its bare essence. Totally yours and only yours. Other people have theirs but it’s theirs. Your time is the only thing that’s really you. It’s the moments that you spend on this Earth. It’s really all you have. Everything else is simply outside of you and therefore not you.

I like time. I like managing my time, something I can’t actually do in that time can’t, in and of itself, be managed, at least not by me. What I’m actually doing is managing myself within something called time. Time management doesn’t really exist. Managing yourself within time does exist. I’ve tended to do that moe and more ever since I became an adult and I eventually got reasonably good at it once my frontal cerebral cortex fully matured. That took a while.

What am I going to do with my time in the future? I’m going to enjoy it. That’s the ultimate in time management.