Time Is Running Out

Time is an interesting thing. It's also interesting how humans react to it.

The best analogy I can use is sports. When you see sports games, one team is up on the other. Nobody panics in the first quarter/period/half. But when you get down to under 5 minutes, people freak out. Time is running out. We have to get the goal/point/touchdown. But it wasn't a problem in the first half to get that score.

I've been watching almost every basketball game in these playoffs (and yes I am quite sleep deprived. Thank you David Stern for having games that start at 9 and don't end until after 1AM.) The one thing hate about basketball is the end of the game when the team who is losing fouls to get the ball back and then they take a time out. It happens in every close game. And it happens multiple times in every close game. It's frustrating. Yet if they were playing with that same intensity throughout the whole game, it would be a different story.

You see so much time wasted in sports (games with clocks, not baseball). In football when they spend 40 seconds to get the play off. Hockey when they just stand with the puck behind the net. Basketball feels like every possession is a waste. (I don't know why I say that. I really like basketball, but watching the Heat last night annoyed me. Terrible half court offense.) That time is irrelevant in the beginning of the game. But then near the end there is a mad scramble to save as much time as possible. It's the natural human instinct "oh we still have 12 minutes left, who cares" vs "crap we have 12 seconds left and we're down by 3."

Another example is work. You spend your 8-9 hours at work every day. But probably around 4-5 you start to scramble to make sure you get your work done for the day so you can get out on time. You spent plenty of time screwing off at 11 though, browsing the web, talking to co-workers, doing whatever. But at 4 you buckle down to make sure it all gets done in time so you can get the hell out of there on time.

There's no real solution here, you can't change the human psyche, but it's just an interesting thing to point out about how we operate. Time is running out, and we freak out.