Recurring Tasks and Achievement
Time seemingly progresses in different rates. Five minutes should be five minutes, but when you are watching your favorite show that’s broken up by commercials one might wonder why they didn’t call it the commercial hour. But well, that’s another issue. Ten minutes at the dentist are for sure much longer than ten minutes at your favorite Italian Restaurant.
It also seems that as we get older weeks, months and even years change the rate in which they are passing.
“That wasn’t last month? That was last year? Oh #@&*”. One convincing theory I once heard was that for children almost every experience they make is new for them and so their brains have to process a lot of new information, but as we get older our brains have to deal with less and less new. As the stretches of days get longer that are bookmarked by new events we feel that time is going by faster and faster. How can we change that?
You can force yourself to watch a chess tournament on ESPN or whack yourself with a hammer on your thumb to stretch time for a short instant or you can try to make sure you do a lot of new stuff all the time.
When we look at the things we do everyday we likely notice that there is a lot of the same. Most jobs require us to do the same tasks over and over again and when we get home it doesn’t get any better. Laundry on Tuesdays, groceries on Fridays, soccer training Mondays and Thursdays, fixing dinner, answering mail, etc.
We do the same day by day, week by week. Years with a vacation spent in Jamaica, become Do-you-know-that-was-the-year-we-went-to-Jamaica-years, because there was not much else during such years that was different. (more…)