I remember back to my 3rd grade teacher Mrs. Chadwell and the game jelly bean justice. The rules were simple stay quiet to yourself for the last five minutes of the day before the bell rang, and you are rewarded three jelly beans. If you talked, laughed, made a distraction, or just tired to signal a friend with a smile, then you lost a jelly bean for each infraction. Those five minutes were wickedly long. Each second passing by at a glaciers speed. Why did I experience time to move so slowly in that game?

A more recent memory is when I started my mindfulness practice. The first few experiences I had with meditation were difficult. Again, I experienced an exaggeration of time, as if being stretched. Minutes feeling like eternity.

On the hand, I’ve spent hours in the ocean surfing with my best bud. Time would go by and the only thing getting us out of the water was hunger. We use to sit in the line up dreaming about what we should eat and how long we could put it off for. Almost always we settled for a delicious California burrito at Roberto’s, and don’t forget the extra sides of salsa verde 🙂

So looking back on these different experiences.. What made moments and the amount of time passed feel different?

I recently found this Ted Talk from Arielle Hein and it deeply inspired me. Tracking and timing the day by the length of time it takes for the sun to rise and then set. I immediately downloaded the plugin on chrome.

In short the one armed clock starts at 12:00 until the sun rises. Then per appropriate duration the hand swings 360 degrees at a consistent rate until it returns back at 12:00 when the sun sets. If this product excites you then go download the plugin here

Everyone experience time, so its an objective thing that we experience subjectively. For an hour at the DMV will be experienced differently depending on the person, even though most people will have a similar painful experience there, lol.

Right now I am designing and prototyping a time blocking product for my Senior Capstone project. It has had me thinking and experimenting in all sorts of ways. Time blocking has been a great tool for me personally. Just making the conscious choice to sit down and work on a particular task is helpful. It creates an objective with a clear start and end time.

While thinking of what problems time blocking solves I found “the Blur”. “The Blur” is when we lose time. Well we don’t literally lose it, we just waste it. It’s when we sit on the toilet scrolling on Instagram and go to get up but our legs went numb due to being on their scrolling for more than 10 minutes. Or that juggling of tasks and distractions as we spend half of the day with no consistent effort on one thing but a weak effort at a bunch of tasks that show little progress.

“The Blur” is the consequence of technology and the constant notifications and distractions that are constantly grabbing at us. Without tangible progress from our efforts we can get caught in the trap of procrastination. By not finishing projects, duties, and task we can get over-whelmed with obligations. Once you get “behind the curve” life can feel pretty stressful.

The running list of things to do just keeps getting longer and we start to feel the heavy burden of life. After reflecting on this I found a deeper sense of motivation to create Timed Momentum (working name). TM is a devise that aids the user in carving out blocks of time for being effective and focus while being accountable for their progress on a certain task.

When we just let the clock run we invite distractions into our lives. With this we are subject to waste time with meaningless interruptions. But when we start to time our tasks we gain an understanding of how long each task should take us. We start to learn more about how effective and efficient we are being. With this it opens room up for improvement.

While time is all we really have here on Earth, I feel that TM is a product that can give people back the time they’ve wasted and start to create days where they truly seized it.

As always,

Peace and love my friends – Keep a cool warmth out there, cheers!