Children are masters in the art of managing their brain’s time. , Photo credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
AAt the weekly meeting of our local public speaking club, I talked to young students about the importance of scheduling—the science of allocating time to their studies. I gave an example of how one of my students improved her math scores by managing to memorize the tables (one to nine) every day. I explained to him that he did it using the “if then” technique. That is, she made a promise: “If I go to sleep, I will remember the tables.” And it worked for him.
But soon after my talk, I realized that adults need to learn about time management from kids. May be, the time in question is slightly different. When we talk about time, we talk about physical time – the one that consists of seconds and minutes. However, there is also such a thing as mind time. The time our mind spends on something with thoughts and feelings. Children are masters in the art of managing their brain’s time.
It is quite common to see people internally thinking for hours on mundane things like spilled milk, even though they are very much in front of their computers, clocking through their project management schedules. But how easily children deal with profit and loss! They certainly feel terrible when a toy is taken away from them for no particular reason, but when they are handed another toy in return, they become happy again.
The point is, for kids, a loss isn’t worth too much of their brain’s time. There is no big win or small win. Whether it is a toy car or an Audi, there is not much difference between the quantity and quality of the child’s enjoyment. As they are still governed by a pure mind, which is free from knowledge, children do not remain in any state – happiness or unhappiness – for very long. They are in flux all the time.
Rabindranath Tagore probably wrote on the same lines Playthings: “Child, how happy you are sitting in the dust, playing with a broken twig all morning / I smile at your play with that little broken twig… I find precious toys, and gold and silver I hoard hoards / You make your merry games with what you find I spend both my time and my strength on things I can never have.
Coming back to my point, I think what I told kids about time management should serve some purpose. When it comes to physical time management, they require wisdom. They need to be responsible. They probably need “if then” thinking. But when it comes to mental time, all they need to do is take away from us whatever enters their system.
Even when we teach everything about time management at the physical level, we need to learn “time management” from them at the psychological level. We need to learn from them not to spend too many thoughts and feelings on their gains and losses. Like them, we must learn to consider everything – a broken twig or a lump of gold or silver, as a game object.
sankar@sankarg.com