Time Constraints: Big and Small

The big perspective

Considering one’s own mortality can be both a humbling and empowering experience. Imagining a human’s life span, e.g., by illustrating the weeks or months you have left puts things into perspective. Not that we ever now how much we have really left. But even if you’ll reach a hundred years and stay reasonably healthy, you’ve past a quarter of your life by 25 and a third in your 33th year.

While reading I. Yalom’s Creatures of a Day over the last week, I’ve come into contact with such thoughts more often again. My mortality and that of everyone around me, the finitude of the time we have left to do and be.

The small perspective

We can also use time constraints to help us with efficienty in the small. Parkonson’s law states:

“work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

When we thus consciously restrict the time available to work at something, and stick to our restriction, we will do our best to get the specific task done within that contsraint. Or at least we get closer to it the more often we try.