One of the most usual reactions a person has when another asks what time of the day it is, is to look at one's wrist so as to take a look at the small portable clock displaying the time. Frequently watching time, or better yet, looking at a wrist watch or wall-hanging clock to find out how much time one has left before performing an action, is a common practice, found in all time-conscious societies.

Living in today's fast-paced world, time is being regarded as a luxury, as well as a threat. Having too much or too little time in our hands, more and more often we tend to be in a kind of discrepancy with what the time period in our day is and how much of it have we allocated to pursue a specific cause or perform any type of activity. Staying long hours at work, reduces the time we spend with our beloved ones. On the other hand, spending less than the required time at the office to finish a task can result in others considering us to be slackers or lazy. Going out to celebrate with friends until the wee hours of the morning reduces the necessary amount of time we should be spending sleeping and relaxing. Long business lunches, extract time from our daily office routine, making us stay longer at the office. Continuing playing a video-game when we should in fact stop to eat, relax our eyes or do some errands, results in time periods forever lost. That thought alone, can be devastating to some, who although consider time as one of the most important elements in their time, they tend to forget to check their watch when they should, making later feel guilty for the time not wisely allocated and most importantly unproductive.

But wearing a wrist watch or hanging and placing clocks around our house or office area cannot alone resolve the problem of misplacing time. They might act as a reminder mechanism to help us understand how much time we spend in order to perform a specific task, but will not lead us to regain the time we will loose traveling in the bus, waiting for the metro, electronically receiving a file, or trying on outfits that do not fit us. What can help is rethinking time itself. Changing our mindset is the issue of extreme importance at this point in time.

If one considers time as a substance that has a specific beginning and end, whether that is the time the alarm goes off in the morning or the time the sun will rise and fall each day, then time has gained excess power over our minds. Time is not a threat, nor an opponent one constantly has to battle and conquer. Time should be much more productively used if it was considered to be a comrade, a friendly advisor or an assistant. Instead of being threatened by the minutes that pass by, considering life itself a great big unknown deadline with time, it would be extremely beneficial to the person now striving to complete everything inside specific time allocations, to prioritize and set time-irrelevant goals. This might sound tricky when a report is due, but it can be tremendously useful when one looses weight, goes after an academic degree, or reads a book. As all human inventions, time should exist to assist us and not act against our will.