Do You Have the Time?

Have you ever looked at your watch or in our current day, more appropriately your wrist device, phone or computer screen (no one over 40 wears a watch anymore) and say to yourself “where has the time gone”? It might be a movie; in my case it is usually a good book. It could be a day of golf or skiing, or shopping or drinking. In the latter case, time really disappears, doesn’t it. In fact, back in college time disappeared all the time.

Time is weird construct. Google the question, “What is the definition of time?” and you get “the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” Now that is a definition that I need, ahem, time to think about.

I have a habit of reading in the morning for at least 30 to 40 minutes. I have done this for the past two to three years and I’ve noticed that even though I may deeply ensconced in a book, there is a moment in time when I think to myself, “time should be up right about now”. If I check my timer on my phone which I have previously set, indeed I have hit it right about on the nose. I believe my inner sense of time has been honed to know when time is up, yet I have been fully engaged, perhaps in flow while reading.

This lost in time feeling is the seventh characteristic of flow that Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s wrote about in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990). He says, time disappears. A sense of time, hours and minutes is set aside. What may take seconds, sometimes appears to take minutes, but it is enjoyable and present versus being conscious of time.

I think this is also what people mean when they say, “Time flies by when you are having fun”. Time is inconsequential when there is something you can focus on and that task or thing is exhibiting all the other characteristics of flow. Time really does get set aside in these situations, and the truth is, because you just went through a fun or exhilarating experience, you usually don’t care.

Triggering flow means being present in the moment. It means concentrating and being “all-in” for the task at hand. It means getting immediate feedback and being acutely aware of where you are, receiving immediate feedback, and knowing failure is not an option. It would be great if we could be in this state of consciousness more often than not.