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The three most familiar divisions of time we make today continue to be based on the motions of heavenly bodies, though now we call this astrophysics. The length of a year is determined by the time it takes the earth to circle the sun; the length of a month is (more or less) the time it takes the moon to circle the earth; the length of a day is the time it takes the earth to rotate on its axis (and observed by us as the span between two successive sunrises or sunsets). But further divisions are not based on any physical laws and tend to be based on historical factors that are largely arbitrary. There is nothing inherent in any biological or astrophysical cycle that would lead to the division of a day into twenty-four equal segments.

One thing that many successful people do for time management is to calculate how much their time is subjectively worth to them. This is not necessarily what it is worth in the marketplace, or what their hourly pay works out to, although it might be informed by these--this is how much they feel their time is worth to them. When deciding, for example, whether to steam clean your carpets or hire someone to do it, you might take into account what else you could be doing with your time. If a free weekend day is rare, and you are really looking forward to spending it bicycling with friends, or going to a party, you may well decide that it's worth it to pay someone else to do it.

The ancient Greeks had two words for time. The first was chronos. The second was kairos. The Greek god Chronos was imagined as an elderly, grey-haired man, and his name connotes the literal ticking clock, the chronological time, the kind we measure (and race about trying to use efficiently). Kairos is different. While it is difficult to translate precisely, it refers to time that is opportune, right, different. Chronos is quantitative; kairos is qualitative. The latter is experienced only when we are fully in the moment - when we exist in the now.

It's been only in the past 150 years that we've been able to jump across time zones, and we haven't evolved a way to adapt yet. Eastward travel is more difficult than westward because our body clock prefers a twenty-five-hour day. Therefore, we can more easily stay awake an extra hour than fall asleep an hour early. Westward travel finds us having to delay our bedtime, which is not so difficult to do. Eastward travel finds us arriving in a city where it's bedtime and we're not yet tired. Traveling east is difficult even for people who do it all the time. One study of nineteen Major League Baseball teams found a significant effect: Teams that had just traveled eastward gave up more than one run on average in every game.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. ~ HENRY DAVID THOREAU

A business attached to your time is a job. - A business that earns income exclusive of your time satisfies the Commandment of Time.

First one tries to identify and eliminate the things that need not be done at all, the things that are purely waste of time without any results whatever. To find these time-wastes, one asks of all activities in the time records: 'What would happen if this were not done at all?' And if the answer is, 'Nothing would happen,' then obviously the conclusion is to stop doing it.

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next--and disappear. That's why it's important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

We can only spend our time once. It is foolish to not consider why we should take one path and not another. Being clear about why you choose to do something is an under-appreciated first step to living adventurously.

Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under their control.

Automate (fastlane superchArger) Automate your business and honor the Commandment of Time. __Get your time detached from your business.__ The best passive-income money-tree seedlings are money systems, rental systems, computer systems, content systems, distribution systems, and human resource systems. The key to automation in any business lies in these seedlings.

Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally they consolidate their 'discretionary' time into the largest possible continuing units. This three-step process: recording time; managing time; and consolidating time is the foundation of executive effectiveness.

The next question is: 'Which of the activities on my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?'

There are easier ways to live than this. But I do not want an easy life. I am starkly aware that my time is finite. I want to avoid regrets and the drift of decades, even if all I manage some days is stepping away from the email onslaught for 20 minutes to climb a tree. I am not just living for the weekend as I hear so many people sigh at the school gates. I have fewer than 2000 Mondays left to live. I want to make the most of them, not just tick them off!

How to get more time. The 4-step plan from time-management guru Alastair Humphreys (written on the loo) Say 'Hell yeah, or no' when deciding what activities to commit to. Ask the 80-year-old version of yourself whether you should be spending your time on this thing. What can you cut out of your life to get more time? Quit each of your distractions for a week and notice how much free time that creates. Turn off your phone.

Aligning your body clock to the new environment requires a phase shift. It takes one day per time zone to shift. Advance or retard your body clock as many days before your trip as the number of time zones you'll be crossing. Before traveling east, get into sunlight early in the day. Before traveling west, avoid sunlight early by keeping the curtains drawn, and instead expose yourself to bright light in the evening, to simulate what would be late afternoon sun in your destination.

Time is the scarcest resource; and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed. The analysis of one's time, moreover, is the one easily accessible and yet systematic way to analyse one's work and to think through what really matters in it.

Hydrogen ..., given enough time, turns into people.

From chemistry we know that gases expand to fill the space they are in; similarly, we've all experienced how projects and commitments tend to expand - despite our best efforts - to fill the amount of time allotted to them.

Notice that intrinsic value is measured in units of TIME. This "time attachment" introduces the Slowlane's first punitive element of wealth creation. Can you control time? Can you leverage time? You can't. Your time is limited to 24 hours of exchange. If you earn $200/hour, you can't miraculously demand to work 400 hours in one day. If you earn $50,000/year, you can't miraculously demand to work 400 years in your life. Time has no leverage.

By reducing the number of material possessions you have, you can take back the time that your belongings have been stealing from you. That time is precious. It's a shame to waste away what is allocated equally to all of us--only twenty-four hours a day--on material belongings. Instead, devote that time to the pursuit of everyday happiness.

what we call hours, minutes, and days are arbitrary: There is nothing physically or biologically critical about the day being divided into twenty-four parts, or the hour and minute being divided into sixty parts.

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on 'good' rather than 'time' and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.

How did I escape these controls that society finds perfectly acceptable? Instead of trading my time for money (manual labor), I traded it into a business system--industrialized wealth production.

Nothing truly meaningful or lasting has ever been created in a short period of time. If you learn the story behind any great success, you realize how many years went by and how many hard choices were made to achieve it.

"Your Time = Their Money." You should feel empowered to instead invest this value in things that matter more to you.

Free time is bought and paid for by indentured time.

Time isn't a commodity, something you pass around like a cake. Time is the substance of life. When anyone asks you to give your time, they're really asking for a chunk of your life. ~ Antoinette Bosco

Indentured time is time you spend to earn money. Free time is spent as you please.

Time is deathly scarce, while money is richly abundant.