Mostaq Shakil

Christopher was archiving his emails today, he is upgrading his home PC to a new touch PC. Due to extensive smart phone uses every day, his smart finger is too tired to type on keyboard in the evening. The finger looks for somewhere to touch even if he is typing something. Chris ponders, human body reflection is such, it adopts quickly and turns to a habit. His finger has adopted a habit to touch.

While archiving the emails in sort order, some of Sonia’s emails showed up, he quickly scanned through them. Chris dated Sonia for a brief period about five years ago, suddenly reading those emails seems like yesterday. The words were so nearest and dearest it was hard to believe that five years have already passed. That’s 1830 days, Chris choked thinking how quickly those days were gone. He is 38 now and now he looks back, he could not feel those years. No wonder why weekends are coming so fast recently. He then looks ahead and think, in two years he will be 40, arguably a milestone of being a middle aged man. Not that having family and ‘settling down’ ever was a goal of his life but he wanted to have more organized living at this stage. Alas on the contrary, still living in a studio, irregular in food and sleep habits. Chris wonders at himself – where time is. Why can’t he feel the time? It used to be different, he use to enjoy the life and moments. What has changed?

By nature Chris is an analyst, he decides to review his daily life to figure out why time is running so fast. He works as a data analyst at a downtown firm that deals with Accounting software to make corporate life easier. He wakes up around 7:00 AM, immediately after waking up, he checks his smart phone for emails, SMS, missed calls etc. Then he turns his PC on, look at the news, weather, corporate emails etc. He can do this on phone as well but he feels checking on PC is faster.

After having a toast and coffee, shave, brush etc take less than an hour, he gets out from home by 8:15 AM. He is in the office before 9:00 AM and then at the office he is on PC screen for the next 9 hours. He attends a lot of meetings but most of the people in the meeting look at their laptop during the meeting, so is Chris. During the lunch time, Chris gets a lunch box from the café and instead of seating in the café he gets back to his little cubicle to checks his personal Hotmail, gmail and yahoo accounts, read newspapers, answer few group emails of his alumni and of course he has to update his ‘status’ on facebook. More importantly he must read other people status and it is so much fun to write comments on their ‘wall’. Life is so good. Chris also likes to tweet by his phone but it is forbidden during the work at his office. Therefore being a good corporate citizen, he tweets when he is in the toilet. It makes the best use of his time there.

When Chris leaves his office around 6:00 PM and drives back home, his Navigation system in the car helps him to get to the back roads to beat the traffic. Yet another screen in the car but it is very helpful and must have. He arrives home, tries to get some microwave dinner or sometimes he tries some ‘Five minute’ sandwich to get him out of the stressful planning or menu selection for dinner. Now that he has figured out the dinner he can start watching TV. He has a total of 129 digital channels and it takes a while to figure out what he is going to enjoy. Finally he finds some interesting comedy program and he could spend an hour in front of the TV and have a beer for his work life balance.

By then it is 10:00 PM and he now needs to check his emails, facebook and Skype chat again. He easily spends another hour in front of PC, it is 11:00 PM now and he must go to take a shower. After the shower, Chris is ready to go to bed. He now gets his Kindle to read a book and getting ready for tomorrow, another morning and another day ahead that will be full of screens.

Chris sleeps around 6 hours every night. Other than the sleep hours, out of 18 hours every day, he spends about 15-16 hours on screens. Finally Chris figured out where the time has gone, the screens in daily life have eaten all Chris’s time.

I am sure those screens have been eating up many or most of your time as well. Good luck with managing screens in life and spend your time, eyes and fingers wisely!