⏰ In the Interest of Time
I explore how ‘time’ is used to signal the importance of our relationship with something or someone…
I have always been interested in watches, I remember having a huge collection of them growing up. Digital, analog, ones with a chronograph, ones with a light, ones with a flipping cover or the ones with a game inside them; I made sure I had one of every type. This attachment to watches has culminated in a deep-seated fascination for the concept of time.
A simple wristwatch has more than 100 parts to it, all working in tandem to show us what time in the day it is. Not so simple, is it? It turns out that time too, like a watch, isn’t simple. Over the course of the next months and years, I will be using this space to articulate some of my thoughts around ‘time’.
I start by exploring how ‘time’ is used to signal the importance of our relationship with something or someone…
We associate time with value. When we spend more time on something than on others, it is understood to be of more value. This could be a task or a relationship; allotting more time becomes a tool to index worth. The relationality between time and value is a mental heuristic ingrained in how we think. Let’s call this the time-value heuristic (TVH).
It often does hold true, that is, we do (or wish to) spend more time on things that matter to us; say with our family, friends or on an idea that we are passionate about. Although, there are always tasks or relationships that we call ‘time-consuming’ because of the mismatch in their perceived value to us and the time value they demand. So drawing a direct proportionality between time and value might not be all that accurate, after all. However, for a third person making a judgement, irrespective of the nuances, the TVH becomes a goto model.
Now, since everyone around us constantly applies the TVH on us, they believe the answer to how important they are to us (at least partly) lies in the share of our time we give them. If someone wants us to value them, they are expecting us to make more time for them. Again, this plays out in several intricate ways in our lives. It could be your friends complaining about you not spending enough time with them or your boss expecting you to give more hours at work. The underlying reason is the concept of TVH.
“The wide range of influences that TVH carries ultimately puts us in a constant state of negotiation with the world around us with time acting as the currency.”
The wide range of influences that TVH carries ultimately puts us in a constant state of negotiation with the world around us with time acting as the currency. The dynamics are simple; people want more of our time to feel important but we only have so much time for everyone and everything, hence the state of negotiation.
The hack to this negotiation, like with any, is building an understanding of what time (the currency) means to oneself. A firm perception of time is paramount. Time is a beautiful concept, allow me to draw a comparison with water. Just like a litre of water is just that, a litre of water. An hour is exactly an hour. Similar to how water takes the shape of the container, our experience of time too, gets moulded depending on the way we spend it. Time, like water, is shapeless and formless in itself and attains its shape and form through our experiences. Clarity about our own value of time and understanding the experiences we share with time is the first step to successfully navigating this negotiation.
What’s the next step, you ask? I am still in the first step, making sense of my relationship with time. I believe the second step is to use this understanding to communicate the same to the next person and then engaging with them, but I am not there yet.
I am keen on exploring the concept of time further, especially understanding how time functions in the context of our professional lives. I will write more as I learn more.
Edit: I had initially put a linear graph to represent the TVH. Harshit Agarwal, a friend, probed further and pointed out how “since time is a very expensive resource, every additional hour spent with a person signals not just an additional unit of value but something greater than that. Especially true when the number of hours spent with a person grows large.” I do agree with this and will be working to explore this aspect further in the future blogs.
Thanks to Akshat Vachher, Harshit Agarwal, Meghna, and Saloni Mehta for reading earlier drafts.
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