You might remember the earlier which I had quoted in which I mentioned the farmer, a jailbird and the couple in love. It might have been difficult to figure out the differences behind the same concept of time applied to three different instances. In order to clear that up, I would like to introduce you to two people. The first person is Ben and the second person is Bob. Please say hi to Ben and Bob. Ben and Bob say hi to you reader.

Right, now that you have said hi to one another let me proceed to tell you a little more about these two fine gentlemen. Ben lives in the city. He works as a Market Analyst for a firm called @$#& Oops! For privacy reasons, Ben has asked me not to reveal the name of his company. Well, I guess that that’s ok with us Ben. We aren’t too nosy are we? So getting on with Ben, Ben loves his job and he is one of the best in his field.

He has an office on the 56th floor of one of those skyscrapers down town. In fact, even if he takes an elevator, it would take him a good 2 minutes to reach his floor. I need not say that Ben has a very busy life. He does a lot of running around, he does market surveys, he doesn’t do it directly; he has people to do the dirty work for him. But still he does a lot of running around and he is on his toes all day long. No he is not a ballet dancer; that was just a figure of speech that I used to tell you how busy he is. So let’s take a closer look at Ben’s life without appearing nosy.

Ding-a-ling-a-ling! That’s bens alarm clock gone off at 6 in the morning and Ben is up already. Just look at him, though he is in his…well…underwear, he still looks as large as life and as right as rain. What makes a man all perked up than a good night’s sleep. There, Ben is already out of the bathroom and he has put on a track suit. At half past six, he is already in his car and heading for the gym.
I forgot to tell you that Ben is one hell of a looker and is very conscious about his trim body. And in order to keep it that way he works out in the gym every single day and that too for an hour. So that means at quarter to eight he is on his way back home. There is a fifteen minute drive from his apartment to the gym. At 8.15 he has had a shower and dressed and is going down the elevator holding his morning paper in his hand. His office is only a ten minute drive from his apartment but at this rush hour, the traffic just crawls. So Ben chooses to use his electric razor in the car while he is driving, dangerous though it may seem. Did you really think a man could have a shave and a shower in just 15 minutes? Well, think again. And so the traffic crawls on and Ben reaches his office at ten minutes to nine.

There is hardly time for him to grab a bite to eat, so what he does is that he runs to the cafeteria and gets a sandwich and coffee. The coffee he manages to gulp down but the sandwich remains in its wrapper as he notices an interesting article in the newspaper that was still tucked away under his arm. He reads it in the elevator on his way up and reaches his office just in time for his secretary to tell him that there is important meeting for him with the Board Members within half an hour. Ben suddenly realizes that the meeting is about some projects that he had done but the paper work was in no way complete.

There is something like a whirlwind in the office as Ben and his secretary strain themselves to get things done and finally just in the nick of time, Ben is able to walk into the Board room with the necessary documents with which Ben is in no way satisfied. It happens with most last minute jobs you know.

The meeting goes on till noon, you know how people love to talk, and Ben leaves the room with a lot of praises and even more new assignments. He has had one more coffee, but the sandwich that he had ordered is now fit for the waste bin. And mind you this is the third time this week that Ben missed breakfast. Just before noon Ben gets a seemingly endless number of calls from this agent and then that. Oh yes his secretary had been screening the calls, you should see the number of calls that she didn’t send his way.

At last by half past two Ben leaves his office and makes a beeline to the cafeteria. Just as he takes a big bite out of his monster burger, his cell phone beeps. He answers the call to find out that it is a call from a very important client whom he had been trying to fix an appointment with.

The client had agreed for an appointment which was to be had immediately. Out rushes Ben and into the waste bin goes his burger. The meeting turned out to better than he expected and a beaming Ben returns to his office and sits down to a host of pending paper work which keeps him occupied till seven in the evening. At half past seven he remembers his date with Kellie and though he rushes to the spot, he reaches there half an hour late and goes home without meeting Kellie and with an empty stomach and a weary body. So much for working out and being health conscious!

Now that you are acquainted with Ben I would like you to meet Bob. Bob lives in the country. He has a farm. It is not a very big farm; it is one of those medium sized farms from which you can get enough produce to make both ends meet. Bob is up at when the cock crows at five in the morning. As soon as he is up, he goes to his dairy and milks his three cows. I must add that Bob does not walk, he ambles. Having milked the cows he heads back to the farm and sits down with his morning paper. He chats leisurely with his wife who is going about her daily business. Around 8 he hops into his tractor and drives to the nearby dairy to deliver the milk. There he meets a couple of his friends and spends a good half hour exchanging news with them. He gets back to the farm at nine and has a relaxed breakfast.

When breakfast is over, he puts on his straw-hat and taking his dog along starts his daily excursion among his cornfields. His corn has a couple a weeks to go before harvest and now there is nothing much to do but walk around inspecting the rat traps. At eleven he is back at the farm and settles down to listen to his radio playing some old favorite tunes. He has lunch at 1 and then settles down in his favorite chair for a long afternoon siesta. In the evening he again goes to milk his cows, gives them some fresh feed and has one more walk around the farm.
After dinner by seven, by eight he is in bed and the lights are out.

Let’s admit it, Bobs life is so leisurely that we feel like screaming when we watch the pace at which he gets along. He is happy and contented and the only clock in his farm stopped ticking a few years ago. We cannot even draw a parallel line between the lives of bob and Ben. They are two worlds apart. The point I was trying to drive home is that it is our life style that decides how much time we have for each thing. The way we live and what we do decides how we spend our time and how much time we have to spend. We choose our life styles and that decides what we do with our time and that is why I said that we live in our own Time cages.
(Psst…I do not think there are many Bobs alive in the world today.)
So what kind of life do you live? We, that is most of us live in a world of aero planes, and jets, and fast cars and supercomputers and elevators and escalators, and electric trains and a thousand more contraptions and machines that are all intended to save time and do things faster.

Yeah, yeah we talk about convenience, but the fact is that all these machines were the result of man’s endeavor to get things done faster. And the result is that life moves so fast that we could get dizzy if we were to take a minute break and just look around at all the people whizzing around in the daily business called life.

Twenty four hours is hardly enough for us to finish a day’s work. And so what most working people do is that they start compromising on the other seemingly not so important thing like eating and getting eight hours sleep in the night. And so we have such a large number of people suffering from stress related diseases like ulcers, high blood pressure and heart problems.

We cannot do much about the life style that we have chosen. It’s is simply impossible that we suddenly decide to take a break, quit the job, go to the country and live like Bob on his farm. For one thing, there are not that many farms in the country and for a second thing, most of us would die like fishes out of water if we were to settle down in the country. After all, how many of us know how to milk a cow?

What does that mean, are we all doomed o suffer as ulcer patients and blood pressure patients? Far from it; if we are able to manage our time effectively we ca live a city life that is as enjoyable and comfortable as Bob’s life in the country. And that is the purpose of this book.

But that is not all. The main purpose of this book is to help you manage your time better so that you can become more productive and bring a lot of organizing into your life. You will be surprised to find out how much one can do provided one has the time for it and one can have the time only if ones time is organized and managed well.

So if you must build yourself a Time cage, go ahead and do so but make sure you make it big enough so that you have time for every thing and do not feel all cramped and cluttered in a single celled prison.

Scott VanHoogstraat
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