It’s a good thing that time exists. James Glieck has written a great book called Faster that investigates our most important resource, time. Why is it important? Without it, we wouldn’t live. Things would happen all at once. “Time separates events, leaves a little breathing space between them.”[i] Glieck spends a lot of time analyzing how we spend our time each day. For example, we spend about 9 minutes a day waiting for our Web pages to materialize on the our screen, but only 4 minutes a day having sex. Go figure! I hope these aren’t Brand U numbers! [ii]
Peter Cochrane, a futurist, explains the electronic compression and the resulting frustration of work and time in this way. A generation ago (20 years), the average person had a 100,000 hour work life – 40 hours/week, 50 weeks/year, for 50 years. Today, a person can do everything that person could do in 10,000 hours. And in the next generation, a person will be able to do the same in 1,000 hours because of the rapid advance in technology.[iii]
[i] Holt, Jim, “A Millisecond Here and a Millisecond There,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 1999, p. A 15.
[ii] Holt, Jim, “A Millisecond Here and a Millisecond There,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 1999, p. A 15.
[iii] “Time Travels,” Fast Company, January, 1999, p. 58.