​Time flies!

WHAT a terribly busy week it was! It’s one of those weeks where you'd wish time would stop so that deadlines would not come. Oh well, talagang ganyan. You gotta do what you gotta do!

Two more weeks and the quarter comes to an end. To many it would seem that the past 74 or so days of the year went by just like a blur. The bad news is time flies. The good news is you're the pilot. (Michael Althsuler)

Here's what Bob Hirshon says in a study of time gone by:

"We've all heard the saying "time flies when you're having fun." But according to psychologists Anthony Chaston and Alan Kingstone at the University of Alberta in Canada, "fun" isn't necessarily the right word.

I guess more accurately what we found in this study, is time flies whenever your attention is really engaged in an activity, and you're trying to monitor the passage of time.

The researchers asked volunteers to search for hidden objects in a picture–kind of like "Where's Waldo?" --– and to mentally keep track of the time. The more demanding the game, the lower their estimates were. Dr. Chaston says that's because demanding tasks take your attention away from timekeeping.

You had a little counter in your head, an internal clock, which most people believe the brain has, in some form. To monitor the passage of time, you sort of have to monitor, or add up, and count and collect those little clicks. Right? You have to keep track of how many are going by. But if your attention is devoted to a different task, like the visual search task, then you sometimes will miss the clicks that come by.

That could explain why time flies when you're absorbed in any stimulating activity–a stressful shift at work, an exciting game of football, or even a good book–and drags when you're bored.

This study also explains another old saying: "A watched pot never boils." If you've ever actually waited for a pot of water to boil, you can probably relate to this. Staring at a pot of water is pretty boring and doesn't take much attention, which makes the time drag. But if you do something else while you're waiting, like talk on the phone or play a video game, it will seem as though the water boils almost instantly. Or you might even forget to check it, until it all boils away and the pot starts burning."

An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth. (Bonnie Friedman in New York Times)