Scheduling life backwards

STYLE

This phenomenon of scheduling and a need to develop and hone our time-management skills seems to be as ancient as its central focus "" Time itself.

Right from our memory-less infant daily routines of sleeping, consuming and excreting; to our often cramped yet structured boarding school days; to the freedom and flexibility of college days; to "your time is bought and belongs to someone else" work days; right down to retirement days, where we hope to bask in the free time we seem to have accumulated for ourselves: we are constantly bombarded with a mission to manage time effectively.

As nature would have it, time, its only eternal element, has ironically enslaved each and every one of us to strive and recapture it, so as to possess and make the most of it.

Had I asked for her advice back in school, Mrs Mandana, my 11th grade teacher, would probably not have approved of our lives on this beautiful planet being planned backwards.

After all, planning forward was the way to go. Now, as fate would have it, a designer's job is to be ahead of the pack that preoccupies their lives with planning for others. But why, you might ask?

Well, so you can graph, design and anticipate the "need" of the future and then apply time to create a concept from absolute nothingness to fulfill the seamless desires like flashing beacons flagging up season after season.

So how does this new and radical way of looking at optimising your time on earth work? Quite simple, a bit of math, logic, understanding and, importantly, recalibrating along all fronts of life in the shortest possible time. Here, only time is relevant. To set this simple plan in motion, focusing on a reference that can jolt you cold in your tracks comes to mind instantly.

The intention here is not to sound morbid, but rather put things in some dimension of perceptivity. A simple but surprising website called Deathclock (www.deathclock.com) will astonish you with its accuracy in letting you know how much time you really have before you depart from this planet, and will also politely offer you a service to let you know the date and time you will leave for the ethereal journey beyond!

Now, it must be noted that the point of all this is not to panic you, but on the contrary to let you see for yourself a new way of resetting your preconceived notions of yourself and finding Plan B to remould around this new revelation.

To fathom all this, it is important to assess for yourself your way of life. What is important, keep, and dispose of the clutter, unless it helps you grow as an individual.

Calvin Klein told me not too long ago that he was moving in a direction where he could now easily classify himself as a "modern monk".

Interestingly, there is a change taking place in terms of design all over the world that seems to have arisen from the wisdom taken from the modern monk theorem, while influencing us through each passing day.

For example, as the TV gets thinner, rearranging your drawing room becomes evident, the ease that lycra fits with seems to be reason enough for many not to go through custom trials for a true fit, and snail mail is already primordial as e-mail and other elements of e-culture invade our world.

Wine seems well on its way to replacing water at lunch, and hard drives will soon see flash memory taking over their existence. If you just take the time to tune in and listen, it might make you look again at your standards of colours, aesthetics, desires, family and, importantly, life as a whole. If you don't like something, change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it.

After all, it's all about changing, planning and sorting out and capturing the grains of time.