Objective vs Subjective Time

I haven't written here for a while. I've been rather busy. Is that the real reason? Who knows? But one things for sure is that writing a blog is difficult. I can see how, for some, it's a full time job.

I've always wondered why in some cases I put things off. We all do it. It's called
procrastination. And to me the idea of it is very counter intuitive. Because frankly there are many tasks that we want to do, and if we did them, they would benefit us. So the part that I don't understand is, why do we feel major resistance against doing them? Some call it laziness.

I tried to dig deeper on this subject and have been reading a little about procrastination. And lo and behold, it has a lot more to do than simply putting things off. In fact it has more to do with things like insecurity, fear of success, your relationship with authority/parents and more. It's rather interesting and I recommend reading about it yourself.

And here's something that I found really interesting. The concept of time. It plays an important part in why you may be putting things off. I know that it applied to me. The theory I'm talking about is that there are two types of time. One is called Objective and one called Subjective.

Objective time, is the time you see on a clock, or on a calendar. It's very precise or concrete. For example, 11:45am on Tuesday, September the 4th is an example of Objective time.

Subjective time on the other hand is a lot more loose, blurry or abstract than Objective time. It's essentially any time span, either short or long and is not predefined. For example, if your condo is currently dirty, you could say that you'll clean it eventually. Or if you have an important task that you need to get done, you could say to yourself that you'll get it done within the next few minutes, days, weeks, or months.

See the difference? With Subjective time, you don't set a real date and you're not speaking in terms of an exact time frame. You're not paying attention to the concept of Objective time. It's very blurry and can be dangerous. I'll give you a personal example. I've had a broken fish tank sitting in the corner of my condo for the longest time. I kept telling myself that I should look into fixing it and head over to a pet store to get it taken care of. I didn't assign any real date or deadline to the task. Well my tank first broke nearly two years ago! That's right, two years flew by without me taking any initiative to get it done. That's how powerful procrastination is. And in the end, it took me one phone call, and a week later to have the manufacturer send me a tank. Something I could have done a long way back.

So I'm not saying that every single thing you need to do, should be planned in a calendar. But as long as you understand or see the difference between Objective time and Subjective time, well that might be enough for you to get moving on some of your goals. I hope it is. For me, I'm still working it;)