Have you got any time?

Have you ever noticed how many people keep complaining of lack of time? It goes like this: Essi joon, I swear to Barbara’s life, I didn’t get time to call you or answer your e-mails! … I have been bombarded by work and not knowing how to manage all these stress and pressure I receive! …ShooShoo joon, I am stress out! No time to do anything I planed for… These types of complains keeps coming, as far as I recall! I choose a terminology for former and later people as Time Deficiency Syndrome (TDS).

We live in times that people are in constant complain of lack of time. I kept wondering with all these technological gadgets human has invented to make our life easier and provide us with more time to enjoy ourselves, we still keep complaining of lack of time! Anxiety and angst have been reported to be direct psychological consequences of the state known of lack of time.
I just recently read that anxiety levels today are higher than those of psychiatric patients from 1950s!
It might be blasphemous to say anything against what has technology created for us by an engineer whose life is dependable on PDAs, computers, and Internet!J Though, I believe a big chunk of these complains is directly related to use of modern technologies.
As proof, consider the many new words that people and professionals are using to describe this modern state of mind. One common term is techno-stress, feeling of frustration and stress caused by having to deal with changes brought on by computers and other technologies. For example, people used to leave the office and that was that. Now with cell phones, pagers, and e-mail all part of many employee’s toolkit, these workers are stressing because they are always connected and have no down time.
Computer problems can lead to what psychologists are calling technology-related anxiety (TRA). In a recent study reported in the Washington post, 14 percent of respondents said computer problems interrupted their work more than a day, and 21 percent said they missed work deadlines in the previous three months because of hardware and software problems.
Devices have long been a source of frustration and anger, resulting to redo a job or spending longer to finish a job. To my knowledge devices have shown a tendency that is known natural antipathy toward human beings. A word that describes well the latter statement is resistentialism. Almost everyday, we hear the term from someone around us “things are against us” or “I am sure nothing is working on my way”!
I am sure many of you (including me), at least once or twice in his/her life time, has begged a computer to please, please give me back the file containing the drawing I just recently drafted or a report I typed 5 minutes ago, or pleaded a toaster, you know, to actually toast the bread this time rather than burning it to cancer prone bread, then you are ripe for resistential worldview!

Just imagine how much time we spend to learn how new technologies with their related phrases can help to improve our suitable life!
Books, magazines, newspapers, documentaries, licenses, by-laws and manuals do not only bombard us with tons of information where we have to comprehend them, but also by Internet and instant information resources existing under our finger tips we have increase this world of human-machine interaction. Just kindly add the number of e-mails, newsgroups and weblogs that we read everyday, then you would be able to understand why Technological Fatigue Syndrome (TFS) is something that helps us to receive an excessive amount of anxiety plus what I called Time Deficiency Syndrome (TDS). We receive such a large pile of information that we have hard time to plan how to classified or process them, not to mention comprehend and manage them for later usage. Planning for such a large data input is monument task. We may lose track of proper planning and managing of our resource and abilities. As a result not using our time to its utmost efficient way.

Moreover, another big factor is something that is known as desire to handle many jobs, simultaneously. To handle many jobs in one working day requires a daunting planning and usage of our time efficiently. However, with overload of information plus Tehran traffic where takes 2 hours to go from point A to B where usually must take about 10 minutes, we may even forget what we had really aimed for! I think we have a great Persian expression for this, taking couple of watermelon at one instance with only one hand (i.e. Bardashtan chandta Hendoneh ba yek dast!).

I always wonder is there a way to ease technological anxiety and TDS? I honestly do not know since the pace of changes around us is not something in my control and I think with so much desire for a better life we would have a hard time to see things would get any better. However, I would suggest it makes it meaningful for us from time to time if we turn everything off for a while and stand high to evaluate our status. Or just tell yourself I always make time for things that are affecting my soul. So, then let’s start from right now and leave all the watermelons on the ground!!!!