“Time flies” myth busted!

In this blog we bust the myth of flying Time.

As we all know ‘Time’ is a precious resource, sold as a commodity in a capitalist world. How we spend our time on this planet defines who we are and what we are becoming. Time, prima facie seems like a simple concept to understand and we allow it to run our lives without deeper consciousness about it.

There are two basic belief systems around time, one that says it is finite and the other which says it is infinite. Where the belief of ‘time is finite’ exists, there are structures around time and a sense of hurry and a sense of lack of time. In some other cultures where there are beliefs about re-birth and ‘time is infinite’, the pace is slower and sense of time almost negligible.

Whatever your belief may be, becoming aware of it and how it impacts your pace, your goals, dreams and your life is important. What spaces do you want to spend your life in, so you feel more fulfilled, more satisfied. Feeling that time has been wasted creates much anger, blame and guilt. So to understand how and what impact we want to create in this life depends on, How and what we spend our time on.

There is a simple yet Dynamic tool, that can be used to divide, measure and utilize time, It is the time quadrant. This quadrant holds the essence of time and its relativity to our lives.

This quadrant says that time can be divided into four categories, and every quadrant has its own energy. Our being in every quadrant is different and a higher consciousness is needed to be in the centre of these quadrants and observe ourselves.

The quadrant of High Importance, High Urgency holds crisis and high pressure energy. These are crisis situations, related to health, death, relationships and breakdowns of all kinds. If we end up spending too much time in firefighting situations, we would be either freaking out or becoming numb to what is happening to us and around us. Health issues like abnormal blood pressure, vertigo, heartburns etc. could arise out of being in this space.
In Low Importance, Low Urgency quadrant, there are activities which are complete time eaters, like gossiping, watching television or spending time playing mindless video games. Too many such activities create a hole in the time bucket. This quadrant holds the energy of inertia, stiffness and heaviness. Too much time spend in this can cause us to detach socially, sometimes it can cause us to put on weight and associated physical and mental health issues.

Low Importance, High Urgency: Activities which are interruptions and need immediate attention. These could be activities which we need to pay attention to but could be someone else’s high priority. Such distractions when increase they start holding energy or frustration and hopelessness. There is anger and a need to create boundaries when the time increases in this quadrant. Any important Goal or objective can never be reached in this Quadrant.

High Importance, Low urgency: These activities are easy to put in the back burner, as they don’t require immediate attention. These could be creating a financial plan, writing down a will, finding time for positive and meaningful networking, getting trained on a new skill, writing your short term and long term goals, spending time with relations, which matter the most, exercising to maintain your body rhythm etc. Being in this quadrant creates much growth and feeling of self-worth. The last quadrant is the one that creates opportunities of growth for us, It gives us time for self awareness and introspection. Infact if you are reading this article you are spending time in this quadrant, become aware of its impact on your awareness and growth. If you are spending less time in this quadrant then your crisis situations would be more as you don’t have time for planning.

The key is to cut down time from any quadrant that is not serving you, and that usually is the Low Importance, Low urgency quadrant. Start putting time saved from this quadrant into the High importance low urgency space and you would see how dramatically the quadrants start working for helping you achieve what you wish for.

These quadrants are very dynamic and alive in nature, any quadrant that you feed would grow. If we had to sit down and list our activities and put them in the four quadrants, we would know what is eating up our time. Everyone in this world has twenty four hours and there is time for everything, we just have to know where we want to put our time and how? Creating time consciousness and giving due time to all the quadrants, with our choice and complete awareness can liberate us.