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June 07, 2005
Vishy's Vonderful Vitticism #5: The Morning Theory of Relativity
"It always takes longer to do something in the morning than to do it the night before (relatively speaking)"
In my long *cough* wisdom-bestowing experience, I have found that I save what seem like ridiculous amounts of time if I do some of my morning chores the night before. Two quick examples: it seems to take longer for me to choose my outfit for the day or to shave the night before I go to work than in the morning, just before I go to work. In absolute terms, it probably takes the same amount of time irrespective of when I perform a task. It's just that in the morning, I am only half-awake and there's many more things to do, such as get ready, mentally prepare myself for early morning meetings, think of any errands I need to do on the way to work and so on.
In the vein of what a renowned physicist once said
When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours -- that's relativity.this seems like a relativistic time contraction. Am I the only one who experiences this phenomenon?
To use a computer science analogy for this, CPU time for a task is probably the same regardless of when I am performing it, but real time for a task in the morning is longer. If we allot one thread per task, it would seem a lot more of my time is spent thread switching in the morning than the night before, which leads to the perception that I have less time. The perception of having less time is what makes it seem that tasks take longer to do (is this a whole different theory of time relativity in itself?)
Posted by Vishy at June 7, 2005 09:03 AM