Racing against time
PUBLISHED: ‘Note Verbale’, Manila Times (Sunday-Career Times) – 3 February 2008 Issue
Employees need to be in the offices by eight in the morning. Many children have to be in school usually earlier than that. Works or assignments have to be delivered or submitted within a given time frame. There are meetings, activities or gatherings here and there where one is expected to be on time, or at least attend. There are obligations like bills, debts and budget that have to be met or some overdue personal differences that have to be settled. There are also personal wants that are time bound like watching a favorite movie or a concert.
In short, every one has to beat a deadline nowadays. Deadlines are not only imposed by peers, by authorities, by the system, by events or by society itself. Deadlines are also imposed by nature and circumstances, like the cycle of environment where people live or the biological dictates and processes of one’s being. Oftentimes though, these situations are rather postponed to accommodate a myriad of least important human activities until such time that there is a threat or danger to one’s life or property that is clear and present.
There is a race against time because human beings recognize that, one way or the other, things would meet their end. And the usual options are either to extend it or beat it.
What further complicate deadlines is also the fact that human activities are becoming more and more complex as the world gets older. A lot of these activities that satisfy human pleasures impose too much demand on one’s time as if a day could extend beyond twenty hours.
It is easy to blame the unabated progress of, or advancement in, technology and modern science as the culprit. But this is ironic considering that technology and science are meant to make life easier and comfortable. The problem perhaps is that they give everyone broader choices, better facilities, greater access and more freedom which human beings would naturally occupy their limited space of time with.
Racing against time meant having to live in a very stressful environment. Those who do not join the bandwagon are usually typecast or tagged by society as lazy, bums or non-achievers. Those who do usually sacrifice a lot of things that are more significant in life like adequate sleep, healthy lifestyles, friendships, kinship, or for the faithful, even spending just a very brief moment with God.
It is even a source of wonder that even the time that should be spent for leisure, vacations or holidays are also becoming nerve-wracking these days.
Experts suggest that proper time management is the reasonable approach to the race against time. Some suggest to classify human activities in terms of priority, urgency and importance or a combination thereof which would all the more necessitate immediate action above all else. Some recommend a basic action plan of prioritizing, delegating, and learning to say ‘no’. There is a lot of sense in these prescriptions. Getting organized though and doing things systematically in accord with the frame one had set for himself also require a lot of discipline and effort.
Canadian teacher and small business consultant, Susan Ward, is probably right when she said that time management is a myth. “No matter how organized we are, there are always only 24 hours in a day. Time doesn’t change. All we can actually manage is ourselves and what we do with the time that we have.”
There are just too much endeavors in this world that could fill one’s time. It is always a matter of choice which one to take. What is unfortunate is to race against time because the person spent a lot of it on things that do not really matter for his or her personal gratification.
Time is just like money. It has to be spent or even invested wisely. Otherwise and unlike money though, time would never be earned back because no matter how it was spent it will be lost forever.
