Time Slips Away...

Sometimes, I can't help but wonder where my time goes.

That is to say, I feel like I am doing a lot of things, but at the end of the day it seems like more of the time I spent disappeared into thin air, rather than generating tangible results.

What's up with that?

I can't help but think that it's a reflection of the fact that modern life ends up with us spending far more time "being busy" than actually working.

Several decades ago — when I worked in the IT industry — I became friends with a woman who worked in the Human Resources department.

She pointed out that the company simply loved to hire Europeans, because there was a general work ethic that when you were at work, you were expected to work, not to fritter time away with random bits of "busy work" that didn't actually advance whatever project you were working on.

In a sense, she was saying the workers in the US spent more time being "at work" than actually working, hence the exceptionally long work hours.

Of course, it didn't take long for aforesaid European guest workers to wake up to the fact that they no longer got to have their 32-36 hour work weeks they had "back home."

So the equation broke down, soon enough...

The point, though, is that time often slips away from me because I am not focused on whatever is at hand... instead I am navigating a seemlingly endless string of distractions, pucturated by brief periods of actual work.

This morning, I created an actual spreadsheet — as if that isn't a "distraction," in its own right — to chart just how much wasted time becomes part of my daily routine... especially as it relates to the eternal bits of "life infrastructure" we often have to deal with, simply as a result of being alive in 2025.

Of course, I'm not particularly hopeful that I will actually be able to do anything about that wasted time, other than being aware of it.

A lot of the things we deal with are not optional. For example, a notification from my health insurance provider, letting me know that their "preferred prescriptions" list has changed, meaning that I had to spend 20 minutes logging into my health chart online, contacting my doctor and explaining the situation... all so I could get a prescription refill that should have taken two minutes.

Just, annoying...

The interesting — and perhaps a little sad — juxtaposition I am looking at is that there's an increasingly unbalanced relationship between being able to actually focus on something, and simply being alive.

As I said, it feels like an endless series of distractions...

Anyway, I am just trying to get better at using my time wisely, as opposed to simply using my time.

We'll see how that goes!

Thanks for coming to visit and have a great remainder of your day!

How about YOU? Do you use your time wisely? Does it sometimes feel like your tabgible results are out of proportion to the amount of time you spent on getting them? DO leave me a comment — engagement matters! Communities are built because people INTERACT with each other through the content that's created! This is SOCIAL media, after all. So share your opinion, be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer all worthy comments!

Sequence: 095 — Timestamp: 2025.03.06 - 11:55 PST

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