Moving Beyond the Nine to Five

Not all of us have access to the same freedom of choice. Nevertheless, hopefully you will agree that there is still scope to make you time-wiser or time-richer, or both, depending on what values are important to you.

The questions that follow are intended to prompt some personal evaluation of your own relationships with time:

• Are you sufficiently temporally mobile – do you have the scope to choose which portion of the light-dark cycle to work in, whether to relocate to a new pace of life or to switch to a workplace with more employee-driven flexibility?
• How susceptible are you to advertisements telling us how we should or could relate to time?
• What slogan best represents your ideal type of relationship with lived time?
• Are you sufficiently well off to be able to afford diet rich in antioxidants, and to be able to purchase all the time-saving gadgets that living in a leisured consumer society brings?
• To what extent do time-saving gadgets allow you to multitask compared to what was possible in the Victorian era and how many of the following do you normally run at the same time?
• Does the particular culinary time zone you inhabit maintain the same pace, regardless of which day of the week it is?
• How concerned are you about the accuracy of timepieces in your house?
• Are there ever situations where you question the importance placed on punctuality?
• How well do your keep track of short time intervals?

In your various roles as consumer, manager, resident, parent, grandparent, carer, volunteer are you concerned about influencing the choices other people have in their relationships with time?

If you want to consider this and if you want to see lasting positive changes to both other people and your own relationships with time, holding a future time perspective will serve you well.

Samantha Johnson is the marketing manager of BusinessSummaries.com. She is in-charge of social media and business development. BusinessSummaries is one of the world’s leading providers of business content for corporations and business book summaries for executives, managers and businesspersons. Cut down on reading time and still stay on top of the latest business trends and ideas from the business gurus. Visit us at http://www.bizsum.com.

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