Sunday, 01 June 2008

• A Longer Day

  
  I remember I kept on agonizing over huge boredom when I was small. Being that, I forced myself to play with my sofa like a snail on a wall. When I reached university, life becomes busier but not too much, but you get some sense of running out of time when society approaches you. And thus I reject activities that waste time ( in my sense ). Now at such age being pushed to the society, time become much more scarce than ever before. The old idiom "Time is money" struck even harder than I can imagine. An excuse of busy for me and for others drove a lot of low priority activities away. I felt I am saving time.
  
  Have you ever wished a day is more than twenty-four hours? I did. I am a person very mean with time. Time sometimes make a day longer for me, and brought to me a day seemingly with more than twenty-four hours.
  
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  It looks good to have more time, but I guess prisoners or whoever is suffering would cast their vote against me. Then, when is a longer day good? It is good if it is effectively used. Otherwise, the extra time would either be suffering or you will not be doing something you do not like. Take sports, many people, including me, argue that there is not enough time for sports : too busy for that. However, the fact is even if there are a month there would not be time for sports either, you will probably use that time do something you like.
  
  Well, it doesn't look too bad considering time is used to do what one likes. But then, that is only based on your assumption you know what to pick. Sometimes work would be relieved from me, and a block of time goes free and enlengthens my day. Sadly, a lot of the time these rare occurrences lead to further procrastinations and ineffective time use, and for programmers they are likely to bury themselves into work that they thought they must complete. I am a programmer, and I was one of them. I know it. I think this works similarly for my friends who work in Big Four in Hong Kong, and I heard too many horrifying work experiences.
  
  Ironically, when work forces me to stay in office, I can still often end the day with the same workdone as expected, because things are still planned and executed. I might not be able to complete it, but I probably would have done more than even having a whole day. Efficiency here. As most of us have noticed, you will never begin work until the last moment. In fact, efficiency increases exponentially towards the deadline. There is no quality guarantee, but you know it can be done at the least. The trick is to pick the right time to start working so you can complete it with most efficiency. So, attitude towards time matters than just only time itself.
  
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  As I ponder deeper, a longer day does not always mean more workdone, but more procrastination. Procrastination is good sometimes, and is necessary to relax yourself sometimes. It is also a tool to boost your morale should you go stuck in your mind. I procrastinate a lot, to walk around in my office and in Shanghai elsewhere. It builds up the guilt in you to use time more efficiently and to introduce thoughts. However, procrastination is still very dangerous in nature, as it can bring you even more procrastination. It is an endless loop that sometimes you will realize it only after days or weeks, or even months, or worse, years.
  
  A longer day. It is possible to produce that illusion - illusion but very realistic to one's brain that it is almost real. A twenty-four hour day is more effective than a wrong attitude on a forty-eight hours day, just think about the weekend. Whether the trick can play positive effects or not, depends on oneself.
  
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