I’m writing this week’s edition from a plane, and it reminds me of something that a BillionMinds user recently mentioned. She had just taken an international flight and worked for the duration of it. By the end of the journey, not only had she got a huge amount done (despite the discomfort) but the flight itself seemed only half as long compared to when she would sit back and soak up the plane’s movie catalog. “What IS this time thing?” she asked one of our coaches, somewhat perplexed.

That may sound like an odd question, but it turns out that the nature of time is actually very complex, and how we interact with time makes a vast difference in how we work. The rate at which time appears to pass is influenced by our age, the type of activities we are performing, and how excited we are by an upcoming event, to name just three elements. Some theoretical physicists even believe that time as we observe it may not be a reality at all, and is just a reflection of how we perceive our surrounding universe. In other words, time is more biology than physics.

All of this is connected to the habits of some of the most sustainably effective people we’ve ever seen, who have a fundamentally different relationship with time. Of course, they have the same 24 hours, and in fact, many of them have FEWER waking hours because they sleep more, but they are doing something different with what remains.

One example of how things are different for these people is that they often think less about how much time they have, and more about how much energy. They maximise the amount of energy they can use in their available time by getting good rest and by balancing work, rest and play appropriately. To the extent that they DO think about time, it is to understand the times of day when they are at their most productive, and working hard at those times.

Perhaps most fascinatingly, some of the most effective people we have spoken to almost never self-describe at “busy”, despite getting more done than most people each day. As one interviewee put it “Busy is a state of mind, and to me shows I’m not working effectively”.