wellswriting

Albert Einstein Must Have Had Had A Lot Of Deadlines February 28, 2012

Albert Einstein must have had a lot of deadlines for his work at the patent office in his early days of formulating the Theories of Relativity.   The other physicists of his age were working at cushy university jobs and I don’t imagine them being saddled with deadlines and the pressures of watching a calendar date approach as fast as a minute hand seems to move on a clock.  But if Einstein was under the gun for deadlines, he would have realized that time does speed up in proportion to the weight of a deadline.

I say this because my own deadline driven career has been operating at near light speed lately.  I’ve seen dates put on a calendar months ago morph from “achievable at a leisurely pace” to “oh my god”.  As the deadlines have drawn nearer, it’s as if all of the clocks have sped up.  What used to be a twenty-four hour day somehow became twenty-hours then fifteen, and despite increased effort, it seems that the more work I do, the slower the progress seems to get in comparison to the deadline.

That’s when I realized the image of the clock.  You can stare at a clock and not really see the minute hand move, but it does and after 60 seconds of staring, it’s moved without you realizing it.  The days in the calendar are working against me like this.  Two weeks ago I thought two weeks was going to be more than enough time for something that I thought would take a week, but time operating like it does for me right now, it turns out I needed a month.

Man that Einstein was a genius.