Chapter 3

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 is really a lot of time. But on most days it scarcely seems enough. But this is because of certain misconceptions about time. Let us proceed to carefully examine where all that time goes and find out if twenty four hours really is. For that I have listed out certain points which will help you to 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 and the fact is that we do not. Assuming that you hit the sack at least by twelve in the night and taking for granted the fact that you need at least seven hours of sleep; let me fix 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. Waking hours does not mean the hours you take to wakeup but the hours that you are awake. So let us get that straight, we have only 14 hours in a day. Now if you think that all those fourteen hours can be used for productive work, you are wrong again. For we come to our next point.

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 theses things do take up a lot of time. Now the following list that I have drawn up is sure to vary from person to person. But I have taken the times for each action on what I felt to e reasonable times as far as any normal human being is concerned.

Taking a shower.
Most of us take a shower at least once in a day and the time I think we can put down for that is 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 I think a good half hour should be enough.

Getting ready and tidying ourselves.
When we move about in society definitely 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 I think ten minutes is good enough.

Eating
We need to eat to live and though I accept the fact that people have different eating habits and times, I think that and I’m sure doctors will agree with me that a person needs three meals a day and should take at least ten minutes to ingest a meal and not just gobble it down. So that makes it 30 minutes for food.

Time to relax.
Please do not raise an argument now. I promise to deal with this bit later on. But right now I would like to put down 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.
Please we are human beings, aren’t we? And 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 too. So with your permission, I would like to deduct another hour from your waking time.

So now what do we have left?

We started off with 14 hours of waking time. And we proceed to add up 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 would take when put together a good three hours and twenty minutes. That is 3 hours and 20 minutes. I put it down in both numerals and words so that you can get a real taste of the figure.

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 forty minutes. In figures that is 10 hours 40 minutes.

And that is a fact. That is all that we get. So from now on don’t you think that it would e more realistic to say that we have just ten hour 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 waster which you have to look out for and that is what we are going to deal with in our next chapter.

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