In previous parts I wrote about focus and awareness as short and long term benefits of tracking time. But here’s what it’s all really leading to – Money. Oh, come on man! – you may think – focus, awareness, money? Really? Please bear with me…
If these three words don’t correspond for you, please change “Money” to “Energy” for the time being. So here it is: Focus, Awareness, Energy. Sounds better? How about “Ancient Energy”? Ha! We’re getting somewhere here, aren’t we? “Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter”. OK, I’ll stop here, before Master Yoda comes to hit me with his staff ;)
So what’s the connection between tracking time and energy, ehem… money?
To answer this we need to realize where all the energy comes from. To make things simple we can assume that almost all of it comes from a big furnace above our heads. We call it Sun. It shines upon us and every living and inanimate thing around us, literally showering us with energy. Without Sun there’s darkness, there’s coldness, there’s no us, there is no life.
As you must be aware at this point there’s a war going on between the dark side and the light side. The former is the destroyer of the worlds: it makes rock decay, vodka stale, memory fade ;) The latter is the builder and curator of the worlds: it stacks the rocks back on top of each other, it distills and recycles, it puts bits and bytes of information in order.
You can join the dark or the light side. You can consume the world but you can also create it – you can be the lens through which the energy shines, you can help it focus. But make no mistake, the other side is very powerful too, it will try to seduce, deceive you. So you need to stay on track, stay aware.
When we combine focus and awareness we can use Sun’s energy to “turn back the clock”: put one brick back on top of the other, distill wisdom from noise or tequila from agaves :) That’s all we really are – lenses through which energy emitted by the Sun focuses. The better we do this, the more energy passes through us.
So where is money in all this? Well, money is just a convenient way of passing energy. It has many forms, but again, to keep things simple, we’ll pick one of the most universal across all times, all cultures: gold. A piece of gold is kind of useless in itself; it doesn’t have many industrial applications, it won’t grow by itself or even if you water and cultivate it, you can’t grow anything on it, or make it explode to give any energy back. Nevertheless, many man-hours worth of energy was used to find it, dig it out and then refine, mold…. (let’s ignore the non-trivial energy of neutron stars’ collision which created the element in the first place – that’s a gift from the Universe ;). All this energy was spent and, in a way, entrapped in this token, this symbol, never to be released again.
When you get a piece of gold/money it’s really just an acknowledgment that you redirected and focused some of the Sun’s energy in a way that someone finds useful and worth such and such amount of energy/work performed sometimes, somewhere, by someone else in the past.
It should be pretty obvious now that by helping you to focus the Big Furnace’s energy passing through you, tracking time can help you to get this shiny little things – called money – in your hands. There’s nothing really mysterious or inappropriate about that, whether you charge by hour or by product – it’s totally fair – because it’s trading energy for energy. It’s not “your energy”, mind you, so it’s also totally fair that nobody can keep it forever. Which leads us to the final conclusion. No matter how much energy/money passed through you or how much you accumulated for the time being – tracking time can also tell you how much it cost you in the true ultimate currency – time.
Note: my name is Marcin Komorek and I’m the developer behind Eternity Time Log and Bite15 apps.