Analogue time…and life

I encourage clients to value the passage of time just as they value their palates by drinking fine wine; or their enjoyment of the open road by driving character cars and motorcycles. It requires mindful effort to appreciate the passing of time, all the while using an analogue clock or watch where the changing positions of the hands can be noted.

Such mindful effort is in direct contrast to the unthinking, and increasing, over-dependence on enveloping technology that we only partly understand. How many of us are now fixated by phone-checking behaviour that actually removes our power to manage our time efficiently?

One of my personal aims is to increase awareness of the problems caused by this maelstrom of disempowering behaviour brought on by ‘big tech’. Discounting the current focus on, and appetite for, ‘victim’ stories, there are nonetheless clear increases in the incidence of mental health issues among the young resulting directly from overuse of and over-reliance on technology.

The distrust so generated by big tech’s focus on privacy and data intrusion has created a level of ‘techlash’. Despite this there is still a blindness in life and business where computer-based solutions are seen as almost inevitable and the obvious answer to any and all of life’s problems, whereas in fact most problems arise through inefficient or inappropriate use of time.

Thinking Time aims to reach individualists prepared to stand out from the crowd and ‘plough their own furrow’. In any other era I would have said ‘take back control.