Numbering Days
Saturday, 14 June 2008.
How long does a task take you to complete?
I think this is a pretty common question nowadays; we learn to optimize our processes in order to be as efficient as possible in school (because we hate the work so much), and grow in to timeframes even more once we reach college (“oh, that paper took me four days to finish!”). We measure our time in order to make the most of it. But our measurements, as I am now aware, are all wrong.
Take, as an example, a slideshow that I put together for the graduating senior class at my former High School. Given the photographs and music, it probably took me twelve hours in total to format the images, cut the music, find the software for the task, string everything together, process feedback, and burn to disk. So, we'd say that the slideshow took twelve hours to make.
Of course, this is totally and completely incorrect. It took me twelve hours to convert raw data into a DVD. What about taking the photos? I didn’t take them; but taking an individual photo is pretty quick, right? For a hundred and change photos, at, say, three seconds apiece, that’s only another five or six minutes. So, I guess it did only take twelve hours, after all.
But what if we peel off another layer? Sure, taking a photograph from the raw materials only takes a few seconds, but what about the generation of the data that produced it? In this case, we're talking about videos of several people, each of them probably around seventeen or eighteen. So, assuming there is nothing but these students in the photographs, that adds almost a century to my twelve hours. If we took into account each individual tree, blade of grass, block of asphalt, tennis court, or automobile in the backgrounds, this is obviously well over a thousand years in the making.
And, of course, we can peel off another layer, factoring in a century of mechanical evolution that led up to the newest Ford, the many, many generations of families that produced these students, the eons and eons of physical process that rendered life livable on our planet, or even our planet itself! This little eight-minute slideshow of mine was easily trillions of years in the making.
Of course, plotting time like this is entirely impractical—but when you look at every hour of your life on such a scale, it’s pretty hard to feel like you're ever wasting time. Every moment you draw breath is a billion years in other people’s slideshows.
