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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…
What if instead of trying to get better at managing linear time, you could learn to “bend it” — to stretch it out and shrink it down more or less on purpose?
We’ve all had the experience of time “bending” on its own — where something either took much more or less time than the clock or calendar would have predicted. And we’ve all been startled on occasion at how much we were able to get done in the days or hours leading up to a vacation or a real-world deadline. But can we bend time deliberately?
In my experience working with thousands of people from all walks of life, the answer is an unequivocal yes. But unlike in Newtonian physics, where “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” and pushing button “A” will always get you result “B”, the how to is more something you need to get a feel for over time (like driving a car or driving a golf ball).
Here are three keys to getting a feel for “bending time” in your favor:
