Saving Time in Extra Time

June 7, 2024 by Doctor Vernon Coleman

You can learn a good deal by looking (and I mean really ‘looking’) at old artefacts.

Standing in our hallway we have a 17th century long-case clock (of the style usually described as a ‘grandfather clock’). The clock is unusual in that it has just one hand.

Visitors who see the clock usually assume that one of the hands (the minute hand) has fallen off and been lost.

But there was never a minute hand. Back in the 17th century, people didn’t worry about the minutes. They weren’t constantly in a rush to catch a train or get to an airport four hours early in order to get through security. It was good enough for them to know that the time was around a quarter past four or approximately half past five.

These days we rush about catching trains, missing aeroplanes and racing to make appointments. We put ourselves under constant pressure in this way.

But at the same time as we are struggling to save time, we are also wasting time in prodigious quantities.

The most absurd example of this is the internet.

We tend to think of the internet as a time saving innovation. And it can be. But most of the time the internet wastes time in huge quantities. We send endless quantities of emails. And we receive them in terrifying quantities. Buying a new freezer recently involved 12 emails from the seller. And once the freezer had arrived we received a hail of emails telling us that the machine had arrived, and asking us if we are happy.

A week ago I went through my email box and unsubscribed from all the newsletters to which I appear to have subscribed. (I suspect that most of them were simply junk mail masquerading as newsletters). I marked every email that wasn’t important as spam. And since I did that, I’ve saved at least half an hour a day. If I receive too many junk emails at an email address then I kill that address and open another. It’s too easy to waste an hour or two a day looking at, and deleting, unwanted emails. Too many companies bombard you daily, or twice daily, with emails and then sell your address to a dozen ‘associate companies’ who do the same thing. (An ‘associate’ company seems to be one that will pay the original company a fat fee for a list of customers’ email addresses.)

Now that I am into extra time, I am constantly aware of how easy it is to waste minutes and hours and I am, therefore, always looking for ways to avoid wasting time. So, for example, I don’t put the grass box onto the mower because if I do that it will take me twice as long to cut the lawn. If I leave the cuttings where they fall, they will soon become part of the lawn and the grass will be healthier. If a clump of cuttings appears, I just use the rake to spread them about. In the summer this saves me around eight hours. That’s an extra day for sitting in the garden, reading a book and enjoying the view.

Looking back I seem to have spent my life in a hurry and I now have difficulty remembering where the time went. It’s a blur. I feel angry with myself for all the wasted years, months, weeks, days, hours and minutes. I feel angry about all the time wasted on crap – usually crap emanating from other people’s demands. The endless wasted moments accumulate and congeal into waste lands of wasted time. I have become more aware of this wastage as I have become older.

Look after the minutes and the hours will look after themselves.

Look back a few decades and it is astonishing to see just how much people managed to get done before the internet, email and bureaucracy took hold of our lives and ate up the minutes, the hours, the days and the years without our having any say in the matter.

John Buchan, who wrote such splendid novels as ‘Thirty Nine Steps’ and ‘John McNab’, qualified as a lawyer, worked as a diplomat and became a partner at one of London’s major publishing houses. He was also editor of ‘The Spectator’ and the father of four children. He worked as a correspondent in France for ‘The Times’ in the First World War and held a field commission in the Intelligence Corps. He was the Government’s Director of Information and President of various societies. He was an MP and a significant figure in the Church of Scotland. When he was appointed Governor General of Canada, he became Lord Tweedsmuir. He collected a huge number of awards and honours and held three honorary military appointments. In addition to writing 29 extremely successful novels, he wrote 11 major biographies, four collections of poetry, six collections of short stories and 66 other non-fiction books. He also edited 14 books. He often had poor health and was just 64-years-old when he died.

I doubt if he would have been able to cram quite so much into a fairly short life if he’d also had to deal with hundreds of emails and read his own gas and electricity meters.

From Vernon Coleman’s latest book `Old Man in an Old Car’ which is available as a hardcover book from the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com