Time Management: Putting Time on Your Side

Derrick Smith

English 373

December 6, 2004

Project 4: Research Based Service-Learning Project

Time Management: Putting Time on Your Side

Time is life. It is irreversible and irreplaceable. To waste one's time is to waste one's life, but mastery of time usage is mastery of life and making the most of it. Einstein once said, "There is no absolute relation in time between two events, but there is an absolute relation between space and time" (Sharp 1). Time is a mystery. It cannot be tied down by definition or confined inside a formula. Like gravity, it is a phenomenon that we can experience but cannot understand. We are aware of the ageing of our bodies, of the effects of the movements of our planet, and of the ticking of the clock. We learn a little about what we call the past and we know that change is built into our lives. But neither philosophers nor scientists have been able to analyze and explain all of the meaning of time. Not only have they failed to provide easy explanations, but their efforts sometimes seem to have made mystery more mysterious and to have shown us that our lack of understanding was even greater than we supposed.

Some philosophers argue that the passage of time is an important metaphysical fact, but one that can only be grasped by non-rational intuition. Others tell us that the flow of time is an illusion and that the future can no more be changed than the past. Some believe that future events come into existence as the present; the future becomes the actual "moment-in-being."

When spending money, one presumably tries to balance their expenditures in such a way as to obtain the best possible yield. This means that one will probably refrain from spending all of their assets on a single commodity. Instead, one will distribute their expenditure over a variety of different goods and services. The optimum situation will have been reached when it is impossible to increase satisfaction by reducing expenditure in one field