Relationship with Time

If a problem arose, it was typical of my Italian friends to shrug their shoulders and say “Boh”—an untranslatable word that means something like “I have no idea what to say or do, or what you want me to say or do, so I’m just going to make this funny sound and move on with my day.” You can see why this might be great for entrepreneurship or innovat... See more

Christmas and New Year’s are two of the only holidays still widely observed in the United States. Meaning: the vast majority of non-emergency services are off. I’ve alway found it interesting, or clever, or annoying, the way these two holidays were placed an exact week apart: not enough time to really get back in the swing of anything , particularl

... See more

“The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” That’s Charles Dickens. In other words, if you try and break up your day into lots of little chunks of time, your productivity is massively destroyed even though the time available is pretty much notionally the same.

Look at how we’ve changed the capturing of the passing of time. Before we rewired our brains to connect personal with commercial, down time as wasted opportunity, we used to talk about our accomplishments as memories. We remember the marathon we ran, the little moments that made that day feel so significant. That marathon included training, but we ... See more

There are brilliant examples all over the place of people tweaking time subjectively. One of my favorites is the Uber map. It doesn’t change how long you wait for the taxi. It changes the quality of the waiting time by reducing uncertainty. If you look at human emotions, although humans might say, “I don’t like waiting for a taxi,” what makes them ... See more