Now that we’ve got time, what are we gonna do with it…?
Before the COVID19 lockdown, we had fantasized about extended holidays and time with family. Now we are stuck, bored and confused!
Some of us had verbally brutalized our bosses for cutting our leave days short citing just how much we could achieve if we had more time to and for ourselves. Oh, how we will finish reading that book, perhaps backup and arrange all our photos from over the years, write the first draft, or tidy up our financials.
But we all know that weeks into this lockdown, our days have been either or both of these; a frenzied activity of everything yet nothing, or more like watching paint dry.
Despite being inundated with frantic zoom meetings that could easily have been an SMS, we have suddenly found ourselves with more time on our hands than we envisaged, yet end each day feeling fatigued, and wondering what exactly we achieved.
It is the surprising realization that although it was hard getting a lot done within our much-touted pre-COVID tight schedules, it’s harder getting things done with more time on your hands.
Why? The answer is simple.
First is the law of demand and supply. This states that the higher the demand over supply, the higher the price and vice versa. With a seeming excess supply of time, the price of rigour, discipline and focus, the currency for the efficient utilization of time, is low. The reverse is the case when you have a limited supply of time; it comes with the high price of self-exertion; something that is beginning to sound foreign with the COVID lockdown.
Second is the power of focus. Focus and distraction seem like a chicken and egg situation. Do you focus to avoid distractions or avoid distractions to focus? Having time on our hands has made us sympathetic to distractions, reducing our focus levels. A full-house and focus have never been great bed-fellows, have they? Spawns, spouses, siblings and everything in between.
Three is that we are all riding on Parkinson’s Law; “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”. Simply put, if you want a task done in 30minutes, you would. If you want it done in 3 hours, you would. But suddenly, 3 weeks is not enough to achieve what you pre-covidly, could do in 3 days.
But who cares anyway, after all, we are not going anywhere so what’s the hurry?
It is this absence of hurry that has shifted our perspectives. The same thing that made you snort at the email notification from work before you turned your side on the bed and burrowed your head under covers. You — who wouldn’t dare pre-covid, now being emboldened by the languid lockdown life we live.
The greatest human achievements ever, personal or collective, have come from the judicious use of time, mostly through subtle and overt coercion by persons or policies. Remember lazing through school semesters, only to go gung-ho on your courses when the examination time-table was released. Or how you finished that proposal at an inhuman pace, just because your boss gave you a deadline or the client said, “If it doesn’t come in today, you miss the deal”.
What this lockdown has revealed is what we all have known. It is what has led to the systemic conditioning of humans from time immemorial — which is, man truly does not know what to do with time. In reality, people have to be told what to do and worse, made to do it.
It is this existential truth that explains why our lives are dictated to us behind the veneer of societal, biological and institutional expectations.
24 hour/day was never the problem. Neither was a 52 week/year. But the fact that we would feel powerless if empowered with all the time in the world.
The lockdown gives us a taste of this power and with power comes responsibility which must be followed with accountability.
Perhaps the question is not “now that we’ve got time, what are we gonna do with it?”, rather it is “now that we have been given the responsibility to own, control and account for more time than could ever be allowed us, are we going to be more than human enough to make it count?”
