Wednesday, August 29, 2018

68. Invisible Time


A Father and his daughter are talking at home. The daughter is attending the Time Management course at NILS.

Father (looking at a paper stuck at the corner of a mirror in the daughter's room): What is this?

Daughter: A project slash home assignment.

Father: Slash?

Daughter (with hand gestures): Project / home assignment.

F (looking closely at the paper): Combing hair – 4 minutes, WhatsApp Good Morning messages – 12 minutes, searching for notes – 5-6 minutes, searching for clothes to wear – 11 minutes. What are these?

D: Those are the Invisible Time.

F: And I am sure it is as wonderful a concept as that Fallback Time.

D: Be as sarcastic as you want. But everybody has Invisible Time. You have them too. Only you can’t see it.

F: Isn’t that the purpose of invisibility? Anyway, what is it about?

D (like explaining to a child): It is the time you spend for doing things that you are not aware of.

F: Like?

D: Like combing hair. You know you need time to take bath and get dressed. But combing hair comes in between and people often don’t think about that while planning their actions. And they get delayed by just as many minutes as they spend combing hair.
Or, take for example, the third one. I am always searching for notes and papers. Now I am going to find out exactly how much time I lose while searching for things every time I want to study. The same thing happens to casual WhatsApp chats while studying or working.
We are never aware of how much time we lose by chatting or searching for things, but these minutes pile up and accumulate to form a substantial amount of time that is simply lost.

F: That is the Invisible Time?

D: Yes, that is the Invisible Time. And I am trying to make a list of them.

F: I see. Does this talking with me also count as Invisible Time?

D: No, this goes under Wasted Time.

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