Var Productivity Paradox = Total Time — Time Saved;

It’s just another morning and I started from my house to office in my Scooter and I hit a *bad* traffic that makes me wait for a couple of minutes. Those minutes, as you know, are the hardest to spend. I like driving fast in a free lane with no need to hit brakes, because I don’t like waiting on the road. It’s just waiting on the road, I don’t like waiting at all. I call someone and then the first ring goes, the call wasn’t picked up and then the second ring goes, then call wasn’t picked up and before the third ring starts, my brain tells me that it’s disappointed waiting. Oh, is it it all? I order food and the delivery guy takes couple of more minutes than I anticipated (in fact, I’d overestimated the delivery time, but never mind) and I’m disappointed with the service. This doesn’t seem to be just a problem with me and it looks like almost all of us have got this problem (You know, that’s why accidents happen).

That takes me to the philosophical question, rather a pragmatic question —

What the heck am I doing with the time that I save?

Well, that sounds like a very tricky question. What’s tricky is first of all trying to answer:

Does, not wasting time mean saving time?

While I don’t claim that I know answers to these questions, I think we are fundamentally wired to hate waiting. The mere fact that a lot of services or startups these days are promising **On-Demand** services and are getting popular, I assume my hypothesis is right.

If that’s so common with everyone, would it be wrong? Yes, I think. The time that I try to save by not waiting isn’t getting converted into anything. It’s not that the time I save, I’ll use it for living more — nor It’s like the time I save, I can donate to someone who’s about to die. Ultimately, the time with which we are on this planet is certainly fair — which means my 24 hours in a day is ideally supposed to be the time I can live and it is in fact 24 hours because someone who came up with this figure 24 hours, must have been very well aware that the guy’s going to consume this has to wait at some point in a day and hence this figure 24 hours has been finalized. It could’ve been 20 hours or even 10 hours for that matter. But that someone knows it very well.

So, what’s the problem now? The problem is because of this tendency instead of living my life in the given time — I start chasing the time, which also means I can never catch/match a thing that’s not ahead of me (Because it’s actually with me). Hence I constantly and consciously tell myself that I’m lagging behind and this conscious thought is then further forwarded to my sub-conscious, who’s ridiculously stupid to store it without validating it. And the result is, My day never ends with peace, I always feel that I’m not completely making use of my time and finally I am depressed.

My simple misunderstanding of a natural phenomenon has now led me believe that I’m a big fat failure in this world full of successes. I am not encouraging you to waste your time, I’m just asking you to question yourself what’re you doing with the difference between the total time you’ve got — the time that you’ve saved. Time just passes even if i don’t spend, because it’s just a current of fast moving water in which I’m on a boat, I can just go along with it leveraging its speed. If I’m trying control the current or chase it, My journey isn’t going to be peaceful — if there’s a journey left in me!

Var Productivity Paradox = Total Time — Time Saved; was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.