TU students interested in business, executive education, and related subjects may find useful a new book acquired by the Thammasat University Library.

Professor Dorie Clark teaches executive education at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, the United States of America.

Americans have generally been working more hours, and doing so less efficiently over the past year-and-a-half, as remote working has led to confusion of professional and personal activities. Workers are busy and distracted.

In The Long Game: How To Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, Professor Clark suggests that workers should think about and pursue long-term goals. Part of this is being able to say no to things, so that short-term work tasks do not make it impossible to plan larger efforts for the future.

A daily calendar noting work to be done may be better than a plain list, since a calendar requires us to organize what time we will perform certain tasks.

Professor Clark also suggests that if we are not genuinely enthused about some possible projects, then we should feel ready to decline these opportunities.

Four questions should be asked to evaluate requests and opportunities: What is the true time commitment? What is the opportunity cost? What’s the physical and emotional cost? Would we feel bad in a year or so if we do not do this?

If we are not sure about our long-term goals, the best method is to follow our curiosity and become skilled in one or more areas that we are interested in.

She refers to the Google Corporation work approach of devoting 20% of working time to exploring new areas.

Even if projects in the 20% time fail to be productive, they may have other benefits. Professor Clark suggests: With 20% time, we can experiment with no consequences, only learning.

Here are some thoughts about time by authors, many of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:

Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.

• Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Time as he grows old teaches all things.

• Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound,

Love for the endlessness of labor is in itself an initiation of considerable degree; it prepares you for the conquest of time. Being in a condition where you have conquered time guarantees you a place in the Subtle World, where work is an unavoidable condition, just as it is in the body. A complaint about having to work can only come from a slave of the body.

• Agni Yoga, Heart (1932)

Time is the bridge that always burns behind us.

• Poul Anderson, The Burning Bridge.

Time is not a reality, but a concept or a measure…

• Antiphon the Sophist, Truth

That time either has no being at all, or is only scarcely and faintly, one might suspect from this: part of it has happened and is not, while the other part is going to be but is not yet, and it is out of these that the infinite, or any given, time is composed. But it would seem impossible for a thing composed of non-beings to have any share in being.

• Aristotle, Physics

O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer Time.

• W. H. Auden “As I Walked Out One Evening” (1937)

God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints.

• Avicenna

In what time does man live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait. … Devoured by the countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The fulfilled tranquility in which his late maturity would ripen was stolen from him. It was purloined by everyday reality, which, with its events, chance occurrences, and obligations, disrupted the myriad opportunities of youthful time, immortal time. … From day to day, second to second, the self preserves itself, clinging to that instrument: time, the instrument that it was supposed to play.

• Walter Benjamin, “The Metaphysics of Youth”

YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

• Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

• William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell”

Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable. This is what makes it so disturbing to look back upon the time which we have lost. Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty.

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (1967)

Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.

• Jorge Luis Borges, “Juan Muraña”, in Brodie’s Report (1970)

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

• Jorge Luis Borges, “The Threatened”, The Book of Sand (1975)

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.

• Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (1958)

And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are obvious acts of desperation and secret consolation. Our fate (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

• Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952 (1964)

Time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker’s.

• Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (1956)

You shouldn’t chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there.

• Gautama Buddha, Bhaddekaratta Sutta: An Auspicious Day

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)