Time Control.

As a kid, I would often shovel my dinner into my mouth so fast that I’d end up choking or chewing my steak for far too long. Adults constantly told me to slow down, but I didn’t care; I wanted my food now and all at once. As children, we are naturally impatient. The world seems to move so fast, and each year feels like it takes forever. I remember always wanting to rush through everything as an adolescent to get to the next exciting thing. While I was busy rushing, I often heard the adults’ warnings to “slow down” and “enjoy being a kid because time moves so fast when you’re old,” but I never experienced that, so why believe them?

Now that I’m an adult, I know exactly what they were warning me about. The years seem to end almost as soon as they start, and I find myself looking at my camera roll, wondering where all that time went and what I have to show for it.

For a while, I believed the adults around me growing up were right: graduating high school is like reaching the top of a roller coaster, a slow climb followed by a descent so fast that all the moments blur into singular feelings. However, my defiant nature and logic led me to believe that time moves the same all the time.

Time

Time doesn’t exist. Time isn’t linear.

We often hear little quips about time because we view it from a logical and mathematical perspective. We use the sun and moon’s positions in the sky to determine our “when.” There’s nothing wrong with measuring time logically, but we are human! Being human means we exist in many different ways all at once, especially emotionally. Our emotional lives perceive the passing of time much differently than the actual minutes that pass.

• Time moves slowly when you’re bored at work, conscious of each passing second.

• When you’re immersed in an engaging conversation about a topic you love, time seems to slip through your fingers.

We use phrases like “It is only” and “It’s already” when referring to the time because our emotions cause us to experience each moment based on how we feel during those moments. Time moves the same for a 13-year-old and a 53-year-old; the only difference is their expectations and perception of the world around them. These expectations and perceptions create the emotional environments through which we experience the passing of time. Our emotions create a filter that shapes our experience of time because how we feel is crucial to the human experience. Our lives are finite; we only have so many hours until we run out forever. So, how do we use our emotions to experience as much time as we can?

Two Ways to Get More Time Out of Life

More | Yang

Have you ever had a day where you accomplished so many things by 11 a.m. that you felt like you got two days for the price of one?

My theory is that we can associate our time with the amount of things we accomplish in a period of time.

If you pack your time with your version of productivity, your days will naturally feel longer because of your output. We’ve all seen the day-in-the-life videos where some twenty-something wakes up at 5 a.m., completes a three-hour morning routine, then goes to work for seven hours, returns home to run a business for three hours, hits the gym, cooks an Instagram-worthy meal, and completes some niche hobby before bed.

Stuffing your day with productivity milks every moment, giving you a sense of accomplishment and fullness. For the hyper-productive person, a week is much longer than just seven days. Each hour of the day becomes a significant slice of time in the hyper-productive person’s life. Why allow your days to go to waste by passively going through them when you can attack each day and receive more time from it? Optimizing your days will give you more time in more ways than one. You will receive more time to accomplish tasks and goals that will snowball into confidence, inevitably helping you accomplish more. The optimized day lifestyle will reward you with more time and potentially even more income to buy your time back.

Unfortunately, not everyone is built like that. Some people cannot pack their days so densely due to careers, families, and personalities. If you aren’t the “right” kind of person, optimizing your day may just cause you to be overwhelmed and burned out. If packing your day with productivity doesn’t align with your life, you may lose time by trying to go against your natural grain. Stress, worry, burnout, and depression are time eaters; they will consume time from your life. If you aren’t a person who needs to attack life head-on, you may want to try another approach to getting more time from your life.

The optimized lifestyle is for people who use momentum to accomplish extraordinary amounts of productivity in short periods, effectively slowing time altogether.

How to Do It:

If you wish to live an optimized life, you must figure out the best method to structure your time effectively. Blocking out your daily tasks to align your natural rhythms with your most important/energy-consuming tasks is one of the best methods to begin optimizing your life. You want to remove the parts of your life that do not serve your priorities and shift energy to the most important tasks. Using methods like time blocking, flow blocks, and various productivity systems can help give you an idea of how to start building an optimized life. Ultimately, all systems are just rubrics for you to try and mold to your specific needs and rhythms.

Less | Yin

Have you ever had a day where you naturally woke up early without an alarm and went through your day with very few obligations to accomplish anything?

My theory was, “We associate time with things accomplished in a given period of time,” so what if what we accomplished was being present in the current moment?

If you wish to feel all of the moments that pass through your life, you may want to try living slowly. Instead of intentionally packing each hour of your day with a goal, you can make your days sparse and without goals. The intention of slow living is to practice just being in the now moment, without a goal or deadline. Your present moment is the most important task at the moment. Slow living allows us to unplug from the persistent “to-do” lifestyle that never seems to end. When we go slow, we truly have more time to pay attention to every small detail of the beautiful world around us. We no longer have to focus on moving from point A to B but rather enjoy the journey in between. As we slow down, we gain time in a different way, similar to the slowing of time when we’re bored at work, except being bored is the goal. To feel the sensation of time slowly dragging across your being should be your goal.

How to Do It:

Going slow isn’t like optimization. We don’t structure our days to slow down and exist in the moment; rather, we live our lives naturally without the need for distraction. Focus on the task at hand and only that task. If you’re folding laundry, washing dishes, driving, or listening to music, do that and nothing else. We do not need to pack our time when we go slow; instead, we should mono-task our day as much as we can. Mindful activities such as quiet walks, crafting, reading, writing, and art can help you learn what your body feels like when you begin to slow down. Think of the “morning slowness” and try to maintain that expectation throughout your day. Of course, our world isn’t friendly to a slow lifestyle, meaning you may only be able to slow down on the weekends or after work. It doesn’t matter when you can slow down, only that you intentionally learn to slow at points. Over time, you will learn to do it, even in a busy lifestyle.

The Hidden Option | Balance

What if you enjoy the peace that comes from a slow lifestyle but also need to be productive enough to accomplish goals?

Many people act as if they can only choose one lifestyle: be productive or enjoy the present moment.

We do not have to commit to a specific lifestyle to fully feel time. In fact, we can mix and match different lifestyles to match the natural ebbs and flows of the world we live in. We do not always feel a singular emotion at a specific time of day; instead, we go through peaks and troughs like the weather, ocean, seasons, and everything in between. Nothing in the world is static. Life is dynamic, and so are we. A hybrid lifestyle allows you to choose when you need to hit the “gas” on your life and when your being needs you to slow down to recover. Peaks and troughs. When we learn to use an optimized and slow approach to life in a single day, we can align our lifestyle to the approach that is most necessary. You can squeeze time out of work and slowly soak in the moments of your drive home and evening instead of fighting to maintain a specific lifestyle approach. Time moves like ocean tides, and like the ocean, there are more optimal times to use different “lifestyle sailing techniques” for your current needs.

Lifestyle techniques are just one tool of time control that we can add to our Toolbox as we navigate and experience life. Remember, life is an experience fueled by emotions inside the container of time. We get the privilege to live and collect tools that help us figure out how to experience as many emotions as we can within a random amount of time.