It is always fascinating the thought of simple concepts that led to the world's most innovative discoveries. Think of Isaac Newton under the apple tree and facing the sky! Among the most useful of these is the alarm clock, and particularly the snooze function of the same. A bigger fraction of the alarm users are the wake up call users. And when the clock strikes five or whatever evil hour that one needs to kick the blankets away, the alarm clock chimes it's rude way to interrupt a good night sleep. While waking up is inexcusable, the exact moment for waking up can always be put off. Thus they switch on a default answer to the wake up call - Yes, Okay...but later!
This is just one simple example of the human nature as far as time consciousness is concerned. We always seem to create a form of deficit time, the kind that is necessary to slow our hurry in anything and everything. You will find that of all the things you schedule to do within a particular time frame, the biggest percentage is either done at the tail-end or later than the set duration. This does not mean that you were ambitious with your timing. You might actually have been very generous and yet find yourself against time (not time against you!).
But note that you are doing great if at all you beat a deadline without being pushed by your boss! The truth is that only a very small percentage of us meet our time targets. It gets worse at times, not only do we miss the targets by some days, but we also never get started on our 'time budgets' at all! Some will push the activity from one period to the other thinking that the next time it will be easier on their schedules, only to find that it was worse. This in turn creates a viscous cycle of 'I will do it tomorrow's'. some will eventually forget there was something to be done all together.
Think of the famous New Year resolutions. This to many is usually a scape-goat to the failures of the past year. Many explain how much they needed to do this thing but time, or money, or their families stood in the way. Once they year has set on its journey, we keep piling issues on top of the resolutions that they soon suffocate under the weight. And another new year set in and more resolutions are made! The problem here is not the resolution, rather, it is the fact that you have not set up a savings account, you are still adding weight, you have not advanced your education and so on.
The simplest way to meet our own deadlines is to breakdown whatever activities we might be planning into logical milestones. This gives us manageable goals, for example, you no longer look at building your own home, but rather buying a plot, procuring architectural services, hiring a contractor to build the first phase et cetera. The result is the same, but the load is much less and the chances of failure negligible.
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Yes, Okay But Later
Posted on Thursday, January 13, 2011