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This past weekend, I was walking along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston near Kenmore Square. On the sidewalk in front of me next to an apartment building’s stoop, I noticed a character in a dark brown leather jacket, a navy t shirt, jeans, and a dark baseball cap, pulled pretty low with a pretty steep curvature of the bill — a “duck bill” as we called them back home. He wasn’t poor, more like an untidy college student.
As I was about to walk past him, he stepped out and shouted, “excuse me, can you help me for one minute?” I hesitated a bit, and turned to look at him, paused, and then shook my head, and started to walk on. He then shouted, “C’mon! Just one minute, literally, just the equivalent of flipping a light switch.”
I walked on, and after these words, I had no qualms about it.
He didn’t come out and say what he wanted. He was hiding something. He was trying to get me to stop and commit to a conversation. Most people then have a hard time walking away once they’ve made the committment to stop and talk. If you’ve walked around Boston, you’ve probably encountered some sly people that will do this with a simple request and then, before you know it, they’re telling you about something you don’t have time for.
He was a time thief. He was going to try and steal my time.
~
Imagine a crowd of people. A man appears before the crowd in a puff of smoke. A wizard or something.
The wizard says, “I’ve got one hour of time to sell. You must use it today. It will go to the highest bidder.”
What do you think the highest bid for different people would be?
$0 for some. What would I do with an extra hour of time today?
$40 for some. I can make about $80 dollars and hour so it’ll be like a free $40.
$10,000. I have as much money as I need. I just don’t have enough time.
Their life savings. My wife could die at any moment today. An extra hour would be worth it.
~
The valuation of time is very complex. It depends on income, mental energy, physical location, and so on. And consequently, people value their time very differently. And worse, the value of time varies substantially even for an individual.
This causes trouble.
For instance, some would say 5 minutes is a rather trivial amount of time. So they might think interrupting someone for 5 minutes should never be a problem, and anyone that gets upset about ebing interrupted for 5 minutes is some sort of sociopath.
But what if I’m entranced with a thought or problem and that 5 minutes will destroy my train of thought. That loss of 5 minutes is actually a substantial loss. Like having an incredible dream you get woken up from, that you know you’ll never have again.
With such huge variation in the value of time, a time thief doesn’t know the value of what they’re stealing. It might be useless to them, but invaluable to you.
Unfortunately, people don’t value each other’s time. This annoys me. It might seem ridiculous, but no one is entitled to anyone’s time. And I mean no one. We often operate under this assumption that we’re entitled to certain peoples’ time. This is how we turn into time thieves
~
The points of this chain of thoughts is this:
- Don’t let people steal your time. Avoid people that do this.
- You are not entitled to anyone’s time.
- Best Practice: Operate under the assumption that any particular moment of time means the world to the person. This has many positive benefits.
-Kevin
10.23.2011
