TIME NOTES

This is source material for my inquiries into the nature of time.

books--categorize

past, present, future

duration, expectation,

Time is -- a resource, not a constraint

 "I've been on a calendar but I have never been on time"Marilyn Monroe

"Who knows but the world may end tonight"Robert Browning The Last Ride Together

 "Lost time is never found again"Benjamin Franklin 1743

 "Tempus fugit" (time flies) Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) Fasti

 "Veritum dies aperit" (Time discovers the truth)Seneca De Ira

 Baseball player: "What time is it?"
"You mean now?" Yogi Berra

 "The times they are a-changing."Bob Dylan

 "Time is on my side, yes it is."Mick Jaggar

 I am captivated more by dreams of the future than by the history of the past. Jefferson

 

 

Time in retrospect...

, the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory's content, and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view. In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

 

Boorstin in The Discoverers has a good chapter on the history of time. The idea of making everyone in a society synchronize to clock time grew out of the medieval monastaries, where they sliced up the day according to the prayers (matins, vespers, etc.). When European villages started using towers with public clocks, life began to change in a way that helped mechanize people to fit into the industrial revolution that came much later.

 

"Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time. Individuals we consider happy commonly seem complete in the present: we see them constantly in their wholeness, attentive, cheerful, open rather than closed to events, integral in the moment rather than distended across time by regret or anxiety." --Grudin

 

"...one of the major sins against time: that miserly caution, that scorn of promise which, instead of protecting us, snags us destructively against the general flow. --Grudin

 

Executives, used to worrying about the time value of money, now have to manage the money value of time. -- 2020 Vision

 

Current organization models are not time-based. They still operate in a three-dimensional universe of being rather than becoming. Notions of a real-time business and of an organizational life cycle are not widely held or used. --2020

 

Epigenesis...  If things don't develop at their appropriate time, they are not going to develop at a later one.

 

Nobody has ever proven the ability to predict the short term over time –Harry S. Dent

 

"You cannot kill time without injuring eternity."  --Thoreau

 

Time is a way to measure, and hence define, existence.

 

"Money is time."  Time is the key resource, and money the way to measure whether or not you are getting as much full value out of it as you might.          --Stan Davis, Future Perfect

 

Only 66 years separate the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk and man's landing on the moon.

 

"The space of time separating George Washington's first inauguration in April 1789 from Lincoln's first in March 1861 was only seventy-two years, a mote in the eye of history. But that slice of history contained extraordinary events. From a third-rate republic, a sliver of sparsely populated seaboard extending inland from the Atlantic for a few hundred miles, threatened by foreign powers and dangerous Indian tribes, America had become a pulsing, burgeoning world economic power whose lands stretched across the entire continent." --Don't Know Much About History

 

"History is always our guide to the future and always full of capricious surprises.  The future itself is a dead land because it does not yet exist."  -- Bruce Chatwin, Utz

 

"I drank to slow things down and it just speeded them up."  -- Barnaby Conrad

 

The trail always seems to take longer the first time.  Therefore, to expand your time, be adventurous and take a lot of new trails.  Or...  Avoid the familiar path (stay out of the rut). 

 

...research by Stanford's Philip Zimbardo. 

 

A lot of the differences among people are, in fact, based on their differences in time perspective.

 

Zimbardo has found that students who are future-oriented tend to wear watches, take many notes in class and study for longer periods of time, smile more and laugh less than those in the here-and-now group. 

 

In the south Bronx where Zimbardo grew up, people live in the "expanded present," with no future or past.  Some attributes of the expanded-present mode: greater enjoyment of sex, nerve enough to take risks, greater artistic creativity.  "What's happening?" 

 

Lucy the australepithecus -- 4 million years ago

Formation of human culture -- 1 million years ago

 

Light travels 1' in one nanosecond.

 

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.  --Proust

 

In the month Henry Ford was born, July 1863, horses were dragging Union and Confederate cannons to the Battle of Gettysburg.  The first gasoline-powered automobile was 23 years in the future.  When Ford died, in 1947, one in seven U.S. workers held a job in the automobile industry.  Ford said of the Model T, the only thing wrong with it is that people stopped buying it.

 

Xerox technology invented by Chester Carlson in '38, patented in '40.  More than 20 U.S. companies, including IBM, show "enthusiastic lack of interest."  License acquired in '47 by The Haloid Co.  First useful copier bowed in '60.  Now a $50 billion industry employing 500,000 worldwide.

 

Time is God's way of keeping everything from happening at once.

 

Many firms already insist on just-in-time inventory management, but still pay invoices on a traditional basis, thereby retarding a more complete shift to the new methods. This will change. Some supermarkets are beginning to pay suppliers only when an item is bought, not when it is delivered to the store.

 

Time is the way we recognize change.

 

Time is best spent when we are:

concentrating wholly on what we are doing

            freeing our minds from thought altogether

            communicating honestly with others

            draming asleep or awake

            planning

            remembering

 

What is to be avoided is preoccupation and disordered occupation--the compulsive worry, the nervous escape from thought to thought, the scratching and hair-fluffing, the short circuit of distraction.

                                              --Grudin

 

 

 

 

Memory, our resident historian (who is, incidentally, as subject to emotion and prejudice as any other aspect of our awareness)...  --Grudin

 

Lacking coherence with our own past we frequently feel marooned in present time. Lacking a continuum of identity we are compelled, by daily challenges, to reinvent ourselves on the spot.

 

"The future is like heaven--everyone exalts it but no one wants to go there now." --James Baldwin

 

"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be." --Paul Valery

 

"My interest is in the future because I am oging to spend the rest of my life there."  --Charles F. Kettering

            Time Management

 

Fulfill painful obligations as soon as possible.

 

Schedule errands and minor chores together rather than separately.

 

Do difficult things before easy things.

 

Avoid petty disagreements, and do not become upset when others foment them.

 

Make minor decisions quickly, and put them out of your mind.

 

In general, do not concern yourself with trivia.

 

Refuse, politely but decisively, to accept involvements that would distract your from the purposes you value.

 

Seek advice from experts, but otherwise avoid projects whose success depends on the charity or competence of others.

 

Work much and regularly, but rest and exercise as much and as regularly as you work.

 

Ensure that every important activity receives a large and uninterrupted period of time.

 

Sell, give away, or otherwise dispose of your television set.

 

Keep a personal file.

 

Keep a record of your progress by days, weeks and months.

 

Sensible advice, you will say, but mere tactics, useless without commitment. No transition is consistently more difficult to achieve, painful to repeat or easy to forget than the simple step from inaction into action. But in a deeper sense you are wrong. You will not enjoy what you are doing, or indeed truly know what it is, until you have done it well. Commitment is a by-product of involvement. You must take your first steps in the dark.

 

"The new economy is open for business 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The 24-hour society is also the sleep-deprived society. Over time, sleep deprivation takes its toll. You might be able to shovel coal or bend steel while your brin is operating at halp capacity, but in an era when the power of your brain--creativity--counts more than the size of your forearms, 'half capacity' doesn't cut it." Martin Moore-Ede, MD in Are You Sure You're Up for the 24-Hour Economy?, Fast Company, p 72.

 

Steven Covey: Put first things first. Consider what's important vs. what's urgent.