Double Or Triple Your Time!
It's a dream. It's a fantasy. It sounds too good to be true. And you know what? It is! But that doesn't mean you can't have some fun with this fake-out article and laugh at the things people really wish were possible. After all, if you can't laugh at a little math, then you're not reading the right column.
Have you ever looked at your watch and been shocked to see that only five minutes have passed since your last look? When it happens once in a while, the shock wears off and we accept that time really does fly when we are having fun. But what if it happened all the time? What if every hour went by faster than the last one? What would we do with our lives? Would all our tasks be done in half the time it took before? Could we get rid of all those 30-hour workweeks and finally have time left over for fun?! Let's crunch some numbers and find out.
The first thing you have to know is that the time it takes to do something is usually measured in workdays. A workday is a 24-hour period during which you are awake enough to accomplish a certain amount of tasks. For example, the time it takes for you to read this article is about one-twelfth of a workday because it will take an hour and a half from now until my time's up. Unfortunately, there's no calculator on earth that can tell you how many workdays fit into one second, so let's just stick with hours and get on with the fun.
Let's say we want to find out how much time we can save by using our new super powers of speeding up time. The first thing we can do is just plug whatever number of hours you want the calculations to run for, into this formula:
If you plug in 20 workdays, you get a savings of 16 days, or simply 4 months.
How much could you save by upping it to 40 hours? 100? 200? With any luck, we can find out. The formula looks like this:
This is extremely handy because 20 workdays only adds up to about 12 hours per day. I know how much time I spend doing various things every day—you probably do too—and I doubt that you're missing many hours here and there. If you figure out how much time you spend doing things every day and plug that into the formula, you can find out how much time you save if you were able to use your new speed powers.
Let's say I want to know how much time I can save by using my super powers of speeding up everyday tasks. My formula looks like this:
I don't really need to know the answer for more than one hour at a time, so I'm just going to make up a number that looks good and call it good enough.
Alright, so how much time do I save every 20 workdays? A lot, right? But is it possible to know how many months you could save using your powers? Again, my calculation is based on 1 hour/day x 20 workdays = 20 hours. This comes to 200 hours. So I can save up to 200 days. At only 4 months per year (400 days / 12 months), that represents 3 years of extra time every year!
We should also note that if our formula was a little more precise, we would be able to find out other things about the number of days saved by just changing the numbers around. The number of days saved by using our powers is the product of the new factor and the previous factor. For example:
That's a lot of days saved! To make use of our formula, we just have to find out that new factor. If we plug in 40 hours for 20 workdays, this gives us a new factor of 80. So if we want to find out how much time can be saved by using our powers for more than 20 workdays at a time, it's just one fourth as much as before (40/80 = 0.25). It's easy enough to change all the numbers around to find out what factors you would need in order to save different amounts of time with your super powers.
If you had the power of speeding up time like this, how much time would you spend every day? As it turns out, ten hours. Your new super power would save you 20 days a year, but with only 10 hours, every day is precious. Nobody's life is that rushed. Who needs a super power of speeding up time when life doesn't really go by quickly anyway!
This column was first published on May 20th and was reproduced with permission by Arlynne Young. For more stimulating articles, why not visit her blog? Karen E. Peterson is a former math teacher and mom of two in the Seattle, WA area. She is a regular contributor to this blog and can be reached at karenepeterson@gmail.com .
Published with permission from Karen E. Peterson , a former math teacher and mom of two in the Seattle, WA area. She may be reached at karenepeterson@gmail.com . You may reproduce this article freely but only if it is unaltered, all links are left intact, proper credit for Karen E.
Conclusion: I read this article a few times and I laugh every time. It's so ridiculous. Let me be clear: This is a really good example of using humor to bring attention to something. In fact, it's being used as an example in Peter Drucker's book " The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization ." So I'm not saying the jokes are bad. But you have to consider how it might feel to be the butt of your own joke.