24 Hours, However You Use Them

People play a lot of mental tricks on themselves to make time disappear. Sometimes the day just flies by. Sometimes you sleep at strange hours. Sometimes things just come up. Whatever the reason, they're all crap.

No matter how you slice it, there are 24 hours a day, every day. Not a minute goes by that you can't account for. If time seems to disappear, then start accounting for where it goes.

Suppose you write at night. One night, you get really into what you're working on, so instead of going to bed at midnight, you stay up until 5 AM, at which point you go to sleep. You wake up at 8 AM and have to go to work. As soon as you get home, you crash in bed for five hours. When you wake up, it is now the evening and you only have a few hours before it's your usual bedtime again.

In this example, the normal reaction is to say that the day disappeared, or that you spent all day sleeping. This is just a misconception and a misaccounting of time. Despite the nontraditional use of time, all the hours can be accounted for. From midnight to midnight, there was 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, and 8 hours of free time. Those sets of eight simply weren't all collected. It became 5 hours free time (spent writing), 3 hours sleep, 8 hours work, 5 hours sleep, and 3 hours free time. It still adds up the same.

The point of this is to tell you to be aware of your time. No day ever disappears, even if it can feel that way. If you ever feel like you're out of time, realize that you may have simply reallocated hours. And if you ever need more time than you have, you can reallocate hours from the next day (just know that you're going to pay for it later).