When I began this experiment, I realized how hard it is to track time. A few days back, I was trying to recall what I did on a particular day and blanked out for a few seconds.
Laura Vanderkam writes and speaks about time management and productivity. A lot of her work revolves around finding out routines of successful people, how to thrive at work and yet have a fulfilling life.
One of the things that she recommends is keeping a time dairy. It’s basically a record of how you are spending your time on a daily basis. This tells you where you are wasting your time. Even if you do in 2–3-hour gaps, you will realize how tough it is for you to precisely remember how you spent every minute.
If you have ever filled time sheets, you would have realized how farcical they are. Back in the day, I would fill my timesheets in one shot for a few months, with no idea whatsoever how much time I spent on what.
When I began this experiment, I realized how hard it is to track time. A few days back, I was trying to recall what I did on a particular day and blanked out for a few seconds. Personally, being a creature of routine, it’s very easy for me to get through many passages of time in a state of auto-pilot. While being on auto-pilot for certain things has its place in day-to-day life, it needs to be interspersed with memories and instances that we can recall vividly. That’s the ultimate purpose of a time dairy — it tells you what you were doing at a particular point of time, in case you can’t recall.
Souvenirs and photographs serve this very purpose. They represent some memory and take us back to a place in time. We can look at a photograph and suddenly recall in vivid detail many things that happened on that particular day or during that particular time. Actually, a souvenir isn’t always a physical thing. Anything you can recall or remember is a souvenir in its own right. This is one reason why we are able to recall vacations more vividly than any ordinary day.
There are also souvenirs we wish we had not accumulated. A couple of years back, we made a last-minute plan to usher in the New Year at a particular place. It turned out to be a terrible idea. The place wasn’t very nice, the crowd was a bunch of people who just wanted to get drunk and we got nothing of what we were promised. We hurried back home before the clock struck 12. In the same vein, we have all taken jobs we wished we had never taken, met people we wished we had never crossed paths with, had experiences best forgotten. All of these are souvenirs too, but ones we don’t want to recollect.
Chasing Daylight is a memoir by Eugene Kelly, the former chairman of KPMG. He wrote the book after being diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor at age 53 and was told he had just a few months to live. In the book, he writes of a conversation with his daughter where he asked her why she didn’t wear a particularly nice dress more often. She told him it was what she reserved for special occasions. He then tells her to create more special occasions to wear the dress.
The thought for this piece occurred to me when I realized I was spending a lot of time on auto-pilot mode, unable to recall what I spent my day doing or what I had for lunch the day before. While it’s impossible and unnecessary to keep track of time so religiously, even if you’re filling time-sheets for your salary, gathering more souvenirs and memories you are happy to recall on seemingly ordinary days is essential. It might also help you in managing time better, something we can all get better at.
You can begin your journey here.
