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Happy New Year, People, and welcome to my column, ICYDK!
In case you don’t know, ICYDK means in case you don’t know.
Here we are again, at that time of year, when we think about time. We think about how quickly the last year has passed. We think about how much or how little we achieved. We think about how much older we will become this year. We think about coming closer to a general election, or about having moved farther away from a past trauma. But mostly it feels like a watershed, a frontier between a past and a future, and we are wired to put down intentions, devise plans and make the infamous new year’s resolutions.
Let’s talk about time today. Time is that utterly intangible aspect that is ubiquitous to our experiential world. In ancient Greece, there were two different words for time, because there are two different yet intersectional features to the concept:
Whereas Chronos is measured and measurable time, and possesses a quantitative essence that can be marked by the clock, the sun, the moon, or the seasons, Kairos is the time that cannot be measured, but only experienced. It is qualitative in essence, and it imports purpose and implies significance. The embodiment of serendipity, it is about timing and existential coincidence, such as the fertilisation of an ovum, or the meeting of a soulmate, even the missing of an accident due to a delay in events of perhaps only a few seconds. It is about living in the moment and having a mindful experience of time.
I find that mosques give us some notion of both chronos and kairos. Whenever I tell people that I enjoy living next to a mosque, they wonder about the noise factor. At home on the African continent, I have always lived next to a mosque. In fact my last home in Maitama, Abuja was surrounded by three mosques. Not only do you get to enjoy listening to your favourite Imams chant, (and some of those guys are really amazing rockstar vocalists), but you are reminded five times daily to give thanks to your Maker. Most significantly though, the call to prayer gives you a very clear sense of the passage of time. OMGosh, it makes you think, is that the time already?
We organise life through time and we also experience it through time. Even though we cannot really change how we actually perceive it, I am of the opinion that as Nigerians, we can and should change the way we think about time. For example, every day starts with the sun rising and ends with it setting, but the sun doesn’t do that at all. The earth just spins around either toward or away from the sun, creating this illusion of time. We all exist within exactly the same present moment, and yet that moment might be in the morning for one person, the afternoon for another, and even the next day for yet another. Not only do we have differing experiences of the timeline, but we also have differing experiences of the actual passage of time. For example, watching a 90 minute movie does not feel as long as a 90 minute wait at a restaurant, for your meal to arrive.
What could we do to change the way we think about time, and why should we even bother doing that? Well to answer the latter question first, we Nigerians need to realise and admit that we are not the best time-keepers, and furthermore, we need in some way to understand exactly what the consequences can be, of our lackadaisical attitude toward time-wasting. As for the former question of changing the way we think about time, let’s go with the classic symbol of the passage of time: the hourglass and the sands of time. Has it ever occurred to you that when you waste time, it is tantamount to throwing “sansan” in your own garri. Who does that? I’ll tell you who. Nigerians do. But we are so busy burying our heads in the same sand that we also keep sweeping under the proverbial rug, that we do not even register the irreversible damage we are doing to our very own timeline, both individually and collectively, every time we waste time.
Case in point: You have a rendezvous with someone at 1 pm. It’s a lunch meeting that really shouldn’t need more than an hour altogether. It is five to 2pm when the person you are meeting calls to say they will be late. Really annoying, right? Anyone who knows me will tell you that my pet peeve of all time is FTW’s. TW stands for time waster, work out the F, and please pardon my French this one time. Let me break down what’s annoying though. I could have used the extra hour I spent waiting, to complete that spreadsheet I had been working on at the office, a task I interrupted out of respect for the lunch partner’s time. Also, I am now going to be late to my next meeting, which is a disrespect to that other person, and a waste of their time. Additionally, I will have to cancel my personal trainer, whom I had scheduled for right after the second meeting, meaning that both she (personal trainer) and I will not have got out of our time what we had planned for that day.
Yeah, and so what?, I hear you asking. Here’s a fun fact for you: there are only 876,600 hours in a century. That’s less than 0.5% (yes, half a percent!) of Nigeria’s population. It stands to reason that every time half a percentile of Nigerians waste an hour, they (we) have in fact wasted a whole century of man-hours or personhours (a unit of costing in project management and corporate resource management). The problem with that calculation is that invariably FTW #1 has not just wasted your time, but he has caused a knock-on effect to the power of n. For convenience sake, let’s assume that the domino-effect stops at 3, so in fact half a percentile have wasted 3 centuries altogether. The next problem with the math is that it is not merely half a percent of the Nigerian population who are doing the time-wasting. Plus they don’t do it only once a lifetime. So if we can safely assume that a significant percentile of Nigerians regularly are FTW’s, then it must be impossible to calculate the number of centuries we waste each day. And so, in the understanding that time is a finite resource, our lagging behind in development should not be a surprise to us, should it?
Let’s do another breakdown from a different perspective. If there is an election in the year of your 18th birthday, and you are able to vote, then please understand that you only have another 13 times to do so until you clock the bible’s allocated 3 score years and ten.
18…22…26…30…34…38…42…46…50…54…58…62…66…70
Time and the number of times you can do anything in a lifetime, are both finite, always remember that. Do the math, and consider that invariably you will not be available to vote at every election, therefore it is imperative to participate in every election you can possibly participate in, because in no time at all, you are seventy years old. But more on that subject in an article next month, perhaps.
For now let’s just focus on making each time we have any opportunity count. It’s high time we got a grip on our collective and individual time-keeping habits. Every meeting you schedule, every plan you make, is an opportunity. An opportunity to grow, or to make something happen, or to create a memory. Memories are the only thing you can take with you when you die. They can be good, or they can be bad, but creating them is the only thing you can really do with your time. We literally have no time to lose, because with the passage of every second, we are running out of time. One day, each and every one of us will get the final memo, “Time’s up”, when we will either have achieved the gratification of time well spent, or will leave a memory of senseless and shallow prodigality, for all time.
So what to do about our abysmally awful time-keeping habits? Here are a few tips:
1. Learn how to manage distractions
2. Work in the flow as much time as possible
3. Sharpen the saw – regularly invest in yourself
4. Follow minimalism and light asset life and living “in the cloud”
5. Track how you spend time
Read in more detail about this here:
https://www.spica.com/blog/time-management-tips
Let’s use our time wisely going forward!