It is the middle of the week and I am anxious about something that I should be looking forward to. The weekend!

I want to address this whole concept of time management as authored by many self-help gurus. I won’t lecture on what it is, seeing as it is the most puffed up of all vocation-related virtues and everyone is an authority on it. I am only concerned about where all the weekends go or why they go by so quickly! Self-help gurus don’t seem to have any words of advice on this.

I have a feeling I am not managing my weekend time well. I have it all figured out for the weekdays. For the most part things go just as planned during the weekdays, as if the schedule is made of cogs and a wound spring (like clockwork), “precise and with unvarying regularity.”

Weekends however are mysteriously short whether I jam-pack them with activities or lay languidly on my couch doing nothing. Nothing seems to help.

The latest trend among the new wave of Type As seems to be to refer to time management as a mislabeled problem - “because time just is, it cannot be managed.” Whatever that means! If you ask me, I might just rephrase that proverb to “because time just was, it is gone”

If you think of time as a force capable of acting on people, just like the other forces of nature, only without obeying the laws of nature, then it may explain why my weekends go by quickly. It follows that time affects the way I feel, rather than being a period during which action occurs, which is why my “conscious” hours seem longer on the weekday than on a weekend.

I remember reading Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, in which the author narrates Einstein’s dreams in 30 short stories, each exploring how time might behave in different realities. In one story he speaks of how mothers move with their children to the center of time to avoid becoming old, because time stands still in the center. But, those living in the center of time don’t experience it because “experiencing” requires movement of time.

I wonder if Wednesday is the center of time, where time stands still, moving neither backward nor forward and the further away you move from it, the faster the time passes. Since weekends are the farthest from Wednesday, they slip away even before we can acknowledge it. This also explains why I don’t experience the beauty of time staying still on Wednesday. Time is so still today that I am not “experiencing” it.

To corroborate my theory, the last working day in the middle east is Wednesday. Cos, they are in a different time zone? :-)


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On reading this post, Deepan had some great ideas that I take the liberty of posting without his permission. He uses the Wednesday theory to simulate real things.

If we assume Wednesday is indeed the centre of time then there are probably parts of the world where the day is always a Wednesday. It could be any other day, but since each day is exactly like the day before and the day before that it all seems the same. Two thoughts come to my head - deep inside a tropical forest where probably the sun doesn't even reach the land, each day would seem like the last one... or a poor man who sleeps every night hungry and wakes up every day not knowing where his next meal will come from, for him each new day is like the day before and the one before.

How cool is that!