⌛ How we use our time will change for the better

5 min read

The only thing that the rich and the poor, or the kings and the peasants have in common is time. Time is limited and equally distributed, no matter what your social status or your skin color is.

In the hunter and gatherer era, the concept of time is simple, humans go out to explore and look for food during the day and sleep inside the cave to survive from a deadly predator during the night (contrary to a drunk college kid looking for a doner kebab at 3 am).

With the improvement of living conditions, thanks to the various innovations, divisions of labor, and industrialization, humans have an abundance of time on their hands. We don’t need to wait for hours for a mammoth to appear in front of our bows and arrows, we rather patiently wait for our vegan burgers delivered in less than 10 mins to our door.

With the introduction of the calendar as a timekeeping tool, humans have also invented the concept of time booking to pre-book in advance to do an activity in the future, a concept that might sound crazy to our ancient forefathers.

As this article is written in the Covid era, we will see the extended potential application of time booking in the new normal that we might never even thought of.

For example, to enforce social distancing, a customer must book a timeslot before going to a shop, a concept that sounds weird just a year ago but becoming a necessity for the shopping mall weekend warrior.

As the wise man once said, it’s not stupid if it works, so let’s fantasize about how this concept can also be applied to other parts of our increasingly boring life.

Timeslot for a holiday destination

If there is a limited timeslot to visit a certain attraction, be it a park or a beach, we might have the chance to reduce the overcrowding of tourism. Thanks to the likes of Instagram, cheap budget airlines, and decentralization of accommodation through Airbnb, overtourism has spread to all corners of the world.

Other than the short-term profit for some local businesses, overtourism might have long-term negative consequences for the tourist (waiting to have an empty background for your instastory), local population, and environmental deterioration.

For example, Bhutan knows that time is expensive and has long introduced a daily tax for tourists ($200/ day) which is used to pay the country’s education system and infrastructure.

What if there is a booking system for our timeslot in the sun, it might increase the value of the destination itself and eventually might also save us from skin cancer due to hours of sun exposure.Selfish sticks

Pre-booking a night out

Even though some people say they enjoy the experiences of standing in line for hours to enter an overhyped Berlin club, it is not what most people prefer to spend their well-deserved Friday night.

The scene has long relied on the artificially limited supply through natural selections from scary-looking bouncers (comparable to Darwinian style of selection) and “Fear of missing out” dopamine of their patrons.

Imagine if people can pre-book to go to a club/party and was pre-screened by an algorithm that asses people in the blockchain based on their legal age, coolness, and attitude with higher accuracy than swiping left/right in tinder.

We will be able to plan our night out better and don’t have to waste our night talking to weirdos in the line, and getting rejected at the door for looking too “Cheerful”.

Time-based subscription

Okay, this last paragraph is not directly related to time booking, but it's worth pondering on when talking about time. When we think about all the subscriptions that we have such as Netflix, Spotify, Disneyplus, Amazon prime, etc, we are paying for 1 full month though we did not spend 24 hours x 30 days on it (similar to our wasted gym membership).

A normal person would on average consume 1 hour of Netflix time a day watching modern family, meaning that there are 23 hours of idle time in his account.

Why aren’t we charged only for the active time in the platform, probably not many people have asked for it. Imagine if we can choose and manage our monthly subscriptions based on the stuff that we actually watched/ read/ or listened to, we will become more aware of our time and put our money only on the things that we really enjoy doing.

Time is limited

On average we only have around 70 years window to live (assuming you are not eating fries and ice cream every day), minus that to our current age, and the remaining is all that we have.

There is a good article from a famous blog about putting perspectives to our lifetime on earth, I suggest reading it before your 70th Birthday. That’s enough quatsch for the day, its time to enjoy my last 1-hour quota of Netflix this weekend.

Look ahead, watch your back, and save that extra time. Ciao.