Phones and Time

Maybe because I went to bed a bit early yesterday, I woke up a little earlier than usual today. Around 6:30 AM. It used to be that 6:30 was an incredibly early time, but these days that doesn’t seem to be necessarily true anymore.

I turned on my phone thinking I might have gotten a message, and 30 minutes passed in an instant. It was only when I got a call a little after 7 that I realized I had been on my phone the whole time.

30 minutes might seem like nothing much, but compared to other things, it’s not a small amount of time. You could run a lap around the apartment complex and shower, or roast a whole pork belly in the oven. Doing a weekly review also takes about 30 minutes. But once you pick up your phone, time seems to fly by in an instant.

Over the weekend I’ve been reading Haruki Murakami’s “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,” and for some reason there was a similar line in it. Assuming a person lives 70 years, 36 hours is about one twenty-thousandth of that.

It might seem like a speck of dust, but as a developer who normally builds an app used by 7-8 million people a day, I often say things like “This bug happens with a probability of one in ten thousand.” It seems like a small frequency, but it actually accounts for a bigger portion than you’d think.

The 30 minutes I mentioned could be similar. It’s about one-fiftieth of a day, and one-three-hundred-fiftieth of a week.

I’ve always thought it was important to use time well, and since time passes fastest when using a phone, I think I need to manage the time I spend on my phone even more deliberately.