How many minutes do you have in an hour? Or how many hours in a day?
The question sounds absurd, but this is what busy people of today are wishing: “If only there were more hours in a day, or more minutes in an hour, I would have accomplished my task.”
More and more people today are finding their time clogged up with apparently endless activities and responsibilities, and their work lives spinning out of control. No matter how hard they try to get things done, the day is just not long enough!
One wonders how come in olden times people could manage to fill the same amount of time, the same twenty-four hours, with leisure, and never complained about time? In fact they had so much time on their hands that they had to “kill” it! What’s different about nowadays?
Obviously it is not the time that has changed, but the mind. Technology has made us more time-conscious. Chronological time is the same, but psychological time, the mind’s perception of time, has taken a somersault. The modern mind is so tense and tight that it cannot complete allotted tasks in the time given. The tense mind has to budget time and treat it as a resource, giving rise to a whole new science called Time Management. According to a time-management sutra, “Just as a well-run business follows a budget in spending money, an effective businessperson should also follow a budget (or schedule) in spending time.”
But how? Firstly, find out the things that are wasting your time, and these are usually very simple things –– so simple that no one would even think of them as time-wasters –– the inability to say “no” is one of them. Telephone interruptions, postponement… you can make your own list. It may not have occurred to you that not loving the work you do can be a major time-waster. If work is a drag, the mind becomes heavier, decision- making seems to be difficult, and it takes longer to finish the job.
The crunch of time is also felt because in this speedier age there seem to be so many more options available to the individual, so many more opportunities, so many more things one can do. There are new skills to be learnt and new avenues to be explored. Plus tremendous pressure to process the information sent by technical gadgets, which has certainly made life more exciting, but it can also be a cause of time-stress.
How to relax this pressure? Osho says, “You will have to go deliberately into meditative moments. If a person is not meditating at least one hour a day, then neurosis will not be accidental, he will create it himself. For one hour he should disappear from the world into his own being. For one hour he should be so alone that nothing penetrates him – no memory, no thought, no imagination; for one hour no content in his consciousness, and that will rejuvenate him and that will refresh him. That will release new sources of energy in him and he will be back in the world, younger, fresher, more able to learn.”1 Working out of this relaxed state of being will help you to see that in fact there is no pressure of time when there is no pressure of your mind, and you will find you can manage your life much more easily.
By Amrit Sadhana
To continue reading and see all available formats of this talk:
1 Osho, The Secret of Secrets, Talk #12 – To Create a Balance
