Edgewalker's Journal: The Power of Intervals
posted October 16, 2009 - 6:57pm
Time is really big. Some people think it’s a one-way street. Some people think it’s a river, one you can glide down on an inner tube with a cold beer in your hand, one whose rapids you can raft when you hit a
rocky stretch or need a thrill. Time tickles the brain: perfume molecules can reverse direction and go back in the bottle, with the right algorithm and the right bodywork, you can travel back and forth through the stuff. Maybe it’s really an element, and our senses are just too limited to perceive its home state.
It’s definitely physicists’ favorite toy. Not to mention philosophers, poets, race car drivers, musicians, cooks and fashion models.
Whatever else it is or isn’t, time is also our most basic currency. When we sit down at the table of life, fate stakes us. We get a little stack of time to bet or spend. Crazy people, lucky people and the extremely shrewd are the only ones who tend to go all in. They gamble time in hopes of winning their hearts’ desire.
Most of the time, most of us ante up and then fold before the last card gets dealt.
We humans differ most from one other in whom we imagine is dealing the cards.
Time is big, and it’s precious. When we’re young, we can guess how important time is by how much it weighs when we have too much of it and too little of anything else. We get older and realize we have too little of it and too much of everything else.
What to do?
Me, I bought a minute timer. It’s a TripleKitchenTimer/Clock, keeps track of three time streams simultaneously and runs on one Triple A battery. What it turns out to be is a rather powerful tool for budgeting, investing and managing time. 
The obvious first idea for the three tracks is multitasking, but trust me, it doesn’t work. The beauty of the three timers in one is how it lets me nest time, to put parentheses within parentheses—not rating and regulating tasks but aligning related goals, hooking them up like horses in harness so they pull together. I suspect this lets you move farther, faster than if you left time unmeasured and unparsed.
The obvious first idea for the three tracks is multitasking, but trust me, it doesn’t work. The beauty of the three timers in one is how it lets me nest time, to put parentheses within parentheses—not rating and regulating tasks but aligning related goals, hooking them up like horses in harness so they pull together. I suspect this lets you move farther, faster than if you left time unmeasured and unparsed.The space/time continuum, right? It’s inescapable, even within the confines of metaphor.
How far can I run in a minute? How much can I write in an hour? How long did we make love? I traveled to Turkey in my dream. How long was I really gone?
I rest my case. It’s really hard to talk about time without falling into the trap of Big Thoughts.
And the TripleKitchenTimer/Clock is all about living your little thoughts effectively. Knowing how much you spend on what. Knowing how much this dream should cost. Making commitments of focus that invest time and are measured by it.
Today’s simple budget: Four hours in my office; one hour for a xombyte, half an hour to noodle on the infographic, 90 minutes to research and draft a client ad, ten minutes to play Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, which leaves the novel 50 minutes at the end that can stretch past the buzz if the writing’s going well. We’ll call it Friday.
Time is big. The buzzers help keep it from being overwhelming.
Join Xomba Today
Do you like to write? Would you like to make a little extra money on the side? These people do. Join the Xomba community today.
Become a Member
Comments
Your prose or your textbook?
Hey Greecy.
Nice squib on the essay, personal essay in particular.
Your work, or borrowed?
I really like the line, "a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything."
It is the kitchen sink of forms. And most forgiving.
Cheers
Lets travel
Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them.
essay writers
There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. … And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! … The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist.
Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything, usually on a certain topic. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine.
So how long did it?
That's a great question, and I thank you for your investment of attention!
Not something one can or should take for granted. I've been trying to figure out for awhile how to rethink structures to be readable online......one sentence paragraphs? Upper limit, three?
Real numbers would help:-)
Now, how long did it take me to read this?
LOL..just kidding. Wonderful thoughts about time and very pleasant to read so the time went "fast'. Thank you for the post.
Post new comment