Carpe Diem: the Elusive Nature of Time

It’s stolen, wasted, invested or gifted, but, one way or another, it keeps ticking by. People often ask me where i find the time to write: it’s simple, i find it by not spending it elsewhere. And i try to spend it on writing before i do anything else (unsuccessfully today as i’m writing at the end of a busy day, a day where i’ve let time be stolen).

We shouldn’t just think of time as stolen or wasted: we can gift time: to others, supporting, nurturing and helping, or to ourselves, allowing ourselves time to read, to relax, to sleep or to learn. And we can gift it to society by volunteering. Similarly, we invest it in living: celebrating and entertaining, but also in the health of our communities as well as in learning.

Our time is stolen by processes, systems, technologies and people: inefficiency in design is a desperate drain on our time. Things that take five times longer to do than necessary. These fragments of time add up to a huge waste.

Why am i so interested in time? Because we are all busy: our ability to apportion it, save it, allocate it and invest it are central to our ability to engage, to be effective.

People see social approaches as a waste of time sometimes: but they are missing the point. It’s only through engagement that we can truly be agile, and without agility, we have nothing.