This little excerpt from George Ure’s www.UrbanSurvival.com site may be of interest. I have experienced the difference myself, as have many of my friends. Have you? (To vote, you have to go to his site, hyperlinked above, and scroll down til you find this section.)
Coping: About Time
Maybe its because I chat so much with the chief time monk at HalfPastHuman, but lately I have become a bit worried about ‘time speeding up’ simply because it pops up in our discussions as something to pay attention to in 2009. I figure it may have something to do with the approaching ‘singularity’ but whatever it is, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger if you start to notice the same thing.
As you wrap up the year, we’ve got a little project for you: Start doing some benchmarking of ‘apparent time’. This assumes that you have sorted out the difference between ‘apparent time’ and ‘clock time’.
Clock time is when you have a mechanical or digital device which cycles at a predetermined rate. When you run a production line in a factory, for example, I wouldn’t expect there to be any measurable time differences. In 2008 and 2009 you should still be able to run ‘x’ units per ‘time unit’ just fine.
But, where things seem to already be changing is in the passage of ‘apparent time’. You know the type? Apparent time is the dilation of time in the split second before your car is hit in an accident you see developing. It’s the stuff of ‘life passing before your eyes’ as you face a situation where serious personal injury is involved.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this lately. Some days it’s like apparent time is running fast and on other days (like today so far) apparent time runs slow. On a day when ‘apparent time’ is running fast, I ‘run out of time’ on project after project. Simple 3-minute phone calls eat up 15-minute blocks of my schedule. A trip to the coffee recycling station (bathroom if you’re still asleep) seems to take 20-minutes instead of 2-minutes. That kind of thing.
On days when ‘time is running slow’ – like today – I’ve gotten most of the day’s report done a half-hour earlier than usual. Same number of words, same number of emails scanned, it’s just that things seem to be working super smooth on my end.
The ‘dance with time’ is a two-way street. It could be that on ‘slow time’ days, I’m just running super-fast and at peak efficiency. The flip slide is that on ‘fast time days’ I’m running at half-speed or something.
I haven’t found any site that polls and tallies this problem of some days having a different time-base than others, but it would sure make one hell of an interesting study. Wouldn’t it be nice to know on a near real-time basis if the day was “normal” or if a particular day is going to ‘whiz by because time is running fast/you’re running slow” or if instead, ‘time is running slow/you’re running fast”?
Make one hell of a fine web site…I’ll put it on my to-do list Heck of an interesting notion.
Let me test something out here. About half way through today, please click on one of the following two links to vote on how ‘apparent time’ seems to run on Monday December 29 for you personally:
(VOTE) Apparent time is slow or I am running very fast today.
(VOTE) No change, you’re nuts
(VOTE) Apparent time is running fast or I am running very slow today.
Please leave the subject line unchanged so my email router will tally things up for me – thanks…
If the rest of the day runs like this (apparent time is slow/I’m hyper productive) it’ll be interesting to note if it’s a group / global phenomena or just a localized event. Might even lead to ‘time mapping’ which would really be (as folks from the 70’s would put it) tripsidaisical.