WHERE DOES ALL THE TIME GO?

It is quite surprising when you sit and think about where all the time in one day goes.
Twenty-four hours really is a lot of time. But, on most days, it hardly seems enough.
But, this is because of certain misconceptions about time. Let’s carefully examine
where all that time goes and find out how long twenty-four hours really is. For that,
we have listed certain points which will help you get a realistic view about how much
time you really have in a day.

Point 1

We do not really get twenty-four hours in a day. Maybe it’s because we always talk
about the twenty-four hours in a day, we get the feeling that we really do have
twenty-four hours to finish our daily business. The fact is, we do not. Assuming you
are in bed by midnight and taking for granted a person needs at least seven hours of
sleep. Let’s set your waking time at seven in the morning.
That means that you have already lost seven hours, which we can deduct from
twenty-four, giving us only fourteen waking hours. Now if you think that all those
fourteen hours can be used for productive work, you are wrong again.

Point 2

The fourteen waking hours cannot be used completely for productive work. There are
many things that a human being should do in order to continue to live like a human
being and some of these things do take up a lot of time.

Now the following list is sure to vary from person to person.

Taking a shower.
Most of us take a shower at least once a day, and conservatively speaking, could
take ten minutes. For those of you cleaner ones who shower twice a day, put that as
twenty minutes.

Answering the call of nature.
Oh yes, we are all very cultured people who have the best of manners and
upbringing. We dress ourselves properly and conduct ourselves with the utmost
poise. But there are several times in a day when we have to go back to nature and
summing up all those things we do in the bath room, a good half hour should be
enough.

Getting ready and looking our best.
When we move about in society we have to look our best and adding up all the
minutes that we spend in front of that mirror, we get another ten minutes. For some
people of course, this figure comes up to half an hour. But, we can figure 10 minutes
average.

Eating.
We need to eat to live and though I accept the fact that people have different eating
habits and times, it is common to eat three meals a day taking at least ten minutes
(usually more) to ingest each meal. So that makes it 30 minutes, minimum, for eating.

Time to relax.
Let’s assume one hour as the time to relax, and this includes the time that you get to
yourself for prayer or meditation or just to stare out of your window or perhaps the
few extra minutes that you spend in your bed after waking up, waiting for the last
traces of sleep to go away.

Time with family and friends.
We certainly cannot get along with our business of life without chatting a few minutes
every now and then with our friends and the family. So let’s deduct another hour
from your waking time.

So now what do we have left?
We started off with 14 hours of waking time. And adding all the time that we
accounted for in the above mentioned points; let us see how much time we have left
for productive work … provided we still want to exist as human beings.
The activities mentioned above add up to three hours and twenty minutes.
Now if we proceed to subtract this figure from our 14 hours of waking time, what do
we get? We are left with just ten hours and forty minutes.

And that is a fact. That is all that we get. So from now on, don’t you think that it would
be more realistic to say that we have just ten hours and forty minutes to accomplish a
day’s work and not twenty-four hours? For if we continue to believe that we have
twenty-four hours, then we are in effect deceiving ourselves.

But wait, there is more to this story than meets the eye. I hate to disillusion you but
these crucial hours that we have painstakingly added up are not really put to
constructive use. There are certain things called time wasters which you have to look
out for. We’ll deal with this TOMORROW.