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What Einstein Can Teach Us About Time Management
Three keys to “bending time” in your favor
Nearly all time management systems are based on the idea that time is a fixed quantity and we all get access to roughly the same amount of it. There are sixty seconds in an hour, twenty four hours in a day, seven days in a week, etc. But you can’t put time in a wheelbarrow, which means that time is less subject to the laws of Newtonian physics than it is the principles behind Einsteinian relativity.
In case that sounds a bit daunting, there’s a story that Einstein’s secretary, Helen Dukas, found herself in the position of having to answer questions about his work to the general public. In order to help her explain relativity, Einstein shared this simple analogy:
“An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.”
In other words, our individual experience of time is highly subjective and tends to expand and contract throughout the day.
Which raises an interesting question…
