What has more influence on people’s thinking than any religion and more control over people’s actions than any government?
Take someone’s attention and you take their time. As with money, everyone has a finite amount of time to spend, and these companies want to make sure you spend a lot of it on their products.
The best way to get people to waste a lot of time is to make them unconscious of how much is slipping away. Casinos and malls are windowless and filled with artificial lighting so the unsuspecting remain unaware of the diminishing daylight and continue spending money.
We gamble and shop on smartphones these days, however, and the casinos and malls of the digital world never close. Moreover, the “free” spaces of social media we inhabit also seem immune to the passage of time. It’s no wonder we lose track of how many hours we spend in them: They’re designed that way.
It’s always been true, as Benjamin Franklin quipped, that “if time be of all things most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality, since lost time is never found again.” But today—to paraphrase Winston Churchill—never in the history of the world has the attention and time of so many been controlled so much by so few.
Becoming More Conscious of Passage of Time
In a previous article, I wrote about the virtue of frugality and the way that budgeting can change how we think about money, by forcing us to acknowledge the reality of scarcity. Likewise, the first step toward making good choices with our time is to find a way to become conscious of the scarcity of time.To counter this strategy, I started setting a timer on my tablet for every half hour to help make me conscious of how much time was slipping by. This trick affected my thinking and concentration. Suddenly, my time appeared more precious because I noticed it disappearing.
Eventually, it occurred to me that I was reinventing the wheel, or rather, the grandfather clock. The very function these old clocks were designed to perform is now, though, the very reason why many people don’t like them: They ring out a tone every quarter-hour!
Maybe we should reconsider the use and usefulness of those old clocks. Their original inventors were Benedictine monks whose rule required them to pause seven times in their day for prayer. The tone of the clock made them conscious of time and reminded them where they were in that schedule.
We already know how to be conscious of the passage of time. We do it every time we look at the clock while at work.
Becoming More Intentional About Spending Time
In light of the expert forces of distraction arrayed against our determination to spend our time well, we should develop disciplines and make strategic habits that help us be more intentional with our limited time.I used to go to bed at midnight and wake up at 7 a.m. Gradually, I realized that I passed the hours from 10 p.m. to midnight usually unproductive and often unintentional. This year, I shifted my schedule so that I still get seven hours of sleep, but now I go to bed at 10 p.m. and wake up at 5 a.m. (coincidentally, the same sleep schedule Franklin chose).
Between the hours of 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., I read passages of varying lengths from a stack of books and newspapers, pray and meditate, and exercise—all before my work day begins. I find that usually nothing before 7 o’clock requires my attention, and so I can set those hours aside as private.
Tech companies and marketers know clever methods to induce us to spend our time and our money in ways we often would not choose if we had all our wits about us. As a people who fancy themselves self-governing, we must fortify our capacity to make good choices in regard to these resources with disciplines and habits that maximize our liberty.