Time-lines

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There are a lot of things in life that are ‘ruled’ by time-lines.
‘This needs to be done first, before we can do that ~ and for that to be finished at a certain time, we need to start doing this no later than...’

For a lot of things in our lives this becomes a program, something we set up and follow because it works. Like setting the alarm clock at a certain time, because experience has taught that waking up at this time, will get you out the door in time to get to work.
The full time-line may look something like this: Alarm clock goes off ~ hit the snooze button ~ alarm clock goes off again ~ get up ~ feed the cats ~ take a shower ~ make coffee ~ get dressed ~ eat breakfast ~ put your plate in the sink ~ gather whatever you need to take with you ~ leave for work.

Now, some things in this time-line are more critical than others... In this case I would say getting dressed is an absolute must; whereas in a pinch, you could eat a sandwich on the road...

It gets interesting when time-lines are combined with multiple activities, or even with multitasking. All of a sudden there is not one time-line to keep in check; each activity has its own time-line, its own priorities. And as the activities are all happening more or less at the same time, their separate time-lines start interacting ~ and of all goes according to plan, the separate time-lines eventually become one time-line.

In this one time-line, we juggle the critical events of our multiple activities...

Some of us are better at doing this than others.
But even if we are good at multitasking ~ at some point the intricacies of the interwoven time-lines with their critical events can start causing a lot of stress in our lives. If we miss one critical event, something else can be pushed out in time, leaving us late to do yet another thing, and so on. And pretty soon our carefully orchestrated live with its multiple activities comes tumbling down.

Putting ourselves under this kind of stress because of an especially busy time in our lives turns out to be fairly common in the societies of today. And handling it is not that hard, as long as we see how we are closing in on reaching our goals.
It may become a problem, however, when it becomes a way of life.

If multitasking is ‘really our thing’, and we enjoy weaving the time-lines into a workable whole ~ than we should probably take on ‘taking time to smell the roses’ as one of our tasks!
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