Time Accounting

I have been looking a lot at the expectations and supposed prophecies for the year 2012 (ie. dooms day) recently – very interesting stuff. Now, I don’t really believe all that, but I humored the possibility for a moment, that the world and my own life would end in less than 5 years. And I justified the thought by pairing it up with the fact that I can’t guarantee how long my life will be anyway, doomsday or not.

We’ve all asked ourselves what we would do if we found out we had six months to live, so I thought I’d start accounting for how I was spending my time, pretending I had 5 years left to live, in days, 1825. Every evening, I’d write the number of days left until 5 years (the last day) were up, and I’d write an accounting of how I spent that day.

It was depressing! I stopped doing it after about 2 weeks because I was getting a really clear understanding that my time was being squandered and I was living for nothing. Every day, I’d spend most of my waking hours at work, I’d come home, feed myself, and if the day hadn’t exhausted me, maybe a social outing in the evening. No substance, no meaning, nothing!

People who want to lose weight sometimes use the method of keeping a food journal, where they keep track of everything that is going into their bodies. This provides a different perspective on their diet and a way to count the different types of nutrients being consumed. It often helps people eat more of the right things. Time accounting is like a food journal; for me, a necessary evil. It confirmed what I already knew about everything being meaningless, as Ecclesiastes states. But it failed to tell me what I should be doing.