O Tempo perguntou ao Tempo quanto tempo o Tempo tem.
O Tempo respondeu ao Tempo que o Tempo tem tanto tempo quanto tempo o Tempo tem.
[Time asked Time how much time does Time have.
Time replied to Time that Time has as much time as Time has.]

“O Tempo perguntou ao Tempo quanto tempo o Tempo tem. O Tempo respondeu ao Tempo que o Tempo tem tanto tempo quanto tempo o Tempo tem.” – Trava-Línguas Português[Time asked Time how much time does Time have. Time replied to Time that Time has as much time as Time has. – Portuguese Tongue Twister]

When you’re only concerned with survival, you just need to pay attention to sunlight to realize night is coming so you can adjust your behavior in the best way to survive. Why do you need to know how many days have passed, if all you’re doing is trying to survive the next threat, get your next nourishment. and find some shelter?

Even Moon phases – that influence so much in our planet, including ourselves – are not of interest unless you start thinking of patterns of the tides, how to best grow plants, or breeding, and those patterns are only important if you have more than immediate survival in your head.
Not to mention that, in order to understand a pattern like that, not only do you need attentive observation, but also a realization of its existence and importance, as well as a way to keep track of the information, a record of some sort, so you can identify the length of repetition and work with it.

Moon phases

And even if you figure out some useful pattern – like the Seasons -, the will to not only acknowledge them but also count them, comes from a willingness to share the information, to leave a legacy, even if only just counting how many Springs you have lived through so you can be seen has wise (or not).

Calendars

Of course you always need a starting point for a count, so an important date would be chosen and a calendar created from there.

And since different people consider different things as calendar-creating-worthy, we have calendars that are important due to a specific national event, a specific religious event, or a specific astrological event, which explains why we now have so many different calendars active (and who knows how many have been forgotten already), like for example the Gregorian Calendar, the Ethiopian Calendar , or the Islamic Calendar , amongst many others.
Actually the Islamic Calendar is the only fully lunar one, with many calendars being luni-solar and many using the solar year/365 days as their unit, i.e. the time it takes the Earth to do a full revolution around the Sun. This means that potential-future-Mars-dwellers need to remember that, since Mars takes longer than our planet to go around our solar system’s star, hence it’s year having more days, you’ll need new calendars. Either that or use Stardate .

Mars Facts: a year on Mars (687 days) is almost twice as long as a year on Earth (365 days).

Measuring Time

Of course years are good for measuring human scale events, or even planetary scale events if you go through decades, centuries and millennia, but if you’re talking about other subjects that have a shorter duration, you’ll have to use ways to measure time that use smaller units:

• Semester – a period of 6 months, that is crucial in every student’s life;
• Seasons / Quarters – particularly used when working with Nature or even to count one’s age (usually referring to Springs), or in business (quarterly objectives, anyone?);
• Months – depending on the calendar used, their duration may vary, but the most constant one is associated with the Moon’s cycle and lasts approximately 29,5 days;
• Fortnights – a period of “fourteen nights”, equaling two weeks;
• Weeks – a period of 7 days, usually starting in Sunday and ending in Saturday;
• Day – either the period of time from sunrise to sunset, followed by “Night”(sunset to sunrise), or the time it takes the Earth to revolve around itself fully, equaling approximately 24 hours – heads up to potential-future-Mars-dwellers since a day in Mars is longer (little less than 25 hours);
• Hours – 1/24 of a day, equaling 60 minutes – usually used to measure the length of classes and lectures, though I could have guaranteed that some classes I’ve attended in my formative years lasted much more than the one single hour the clock indicated;
• Minutes – 1/60 of an hour, equaling 60 seconds, a very important unit of time measurement when you have a deadline, and when birthing a baby – from experience, I can with all certainty state that before the baby is born the minutes last hours, but after that time becomes normal again;
• Seconds – thanks to Caesium we have this frequency that allows us to scale to minutes and hours without planetary interference, and it is particularly used when you’re cooking, since, when something is taking a long time to boil, you only need to leave it unattended for a few seconds, and it will overflow, as per decades of personal experience cooking;
• Tenths and cents of seconds – units very important if you’re an athlete in a timed competition, since it can cost you victory or give you a world record.

Relativity

For all its possible units and tools for measuring – from hourglasses  to candle-clocks to atomic clocks and the even more recent optical lattice clocks –, time is still relative: you have moments that flash through like lightning, and others where time seems to drag itself and the minutes take ages to tick by.
We’ve all experienced how true the saying “Time flies when you’re having fun” is, especially when we’re focused on something that interests us, that captivates us in a way that everything else just fades out, and we even forget to attend to our basic needs – who needs food when you’re in the flow, right? 😉
On the flip side, there are occasions when the clock doesn’t go by as quickly as it should, and it feels like time is conspiring against us so we have to endure boring lectures, wait for something we really want to happen endlessly or take so long to fall back to sleep that it feels like it should be morning soon.

“Time is relative. You read this sentence in 2 seconds, but my author spent two hours trying to come up with it.”

And the speed of time changes as you move through life, especially if you’re always minding the clock: the more you are commited to a schedule, the faster time seems to pass, like you have no time to do anything other than study/work, sleep and eat.
That feels particularly true after becoming a parent: if before having a child you feel like you never have time for anything, when you become a parent there’s a lot of time you need to dedicate to the new member of the family, so you truly need to use your time to the maximum, becoming proficient at doing a lot of things in 5 minutes that before would’ve taken you half an hour or more!

The same thing happens when you have less things scheduled, everyone says you have more time on your hands because it does feel like so: when you go on vacation (long one or just a day off), and leave the watch at home, you get to experience more than you would otherwise, enjoying every second instead of worrying not to be late to something.
I started not wearing a watch during my holidays as a teenager, so I could play volleyball and swim without worrying about said watch. I had to learn to measure time by the Sun in order not to be late getting home, which I did with the help of Sr. Chico, a life-saving miniature-boats-building fisherman that tended the beach tents there.
After moving to the countryside and becoming a permaculturer/homesteader, loosing the watch made even more sense because the rhythm of the days and seasons is what commands us most, and it becomes easier and easier to know more or less what time it is with experience.

How to tell time with just your hand and the Sun

Because time is what you make of it, I’d love to know what your relationship with it is, and what tips for “time management” you have, so I can write a sequel to this article about that.

Make the most of your time. 😉