I don’t know if it’s just me, but I find more and more that I am ruled by time. Not just that actually, but that now it is starting to annoy me and my view on time is changing.

I am dictated to by technology almost every minute of my day. When I wake up, when I go to bed (i.e. nothing worth watching on TV!), my diary pop ups telling me where I should have been 10 minutes before, life or death tasks that must be completed by X day or the whole world will collapse without that sodding Excel report. I’ll give you a f-ing Excel report! Seriously, where has the human element of trust gone? No longer can you kindly walk to someone, meet them face to face (yeah, face to face, remember that?!), ask them nicely in a friendly tone and trust that support will be given within a timeframe, give or take a day or two. No, now you do it all by technology. Send an email of what is required and a diary invite for when delivery must be received. If you are really tight to time and fail to deliver by the outlook pop up, you could be lucky enough to receive a text message notifying you that your P45 will be posted and you have been fired! What has the world come to?!

Continuing with the subject of time, I just don’t feel I have any. When in reality, I probably have a bit more than most as I don’t have kids yet. I probably do it to myself, I like to plan, I like to have things organised and it’s not unusual for my husband and I to have the next couple of months of weekends and things to do sorted out. I don’t like not knowing, I hate surprises, I book my holidays a year in advance, I’m not particularly spontaneous and going off plan annoys me. Yet I can still moan about time I hear you say! Absolutely, there is a difference. My time (non at work time) is fine to be organised because that’s what I like doing and normally it is things I really want to do. I guess what I am really saying is that if I choose to do something exciting it’s alright, but if it is chosen for me and involves Microsoft, it’s taking my time away! Yeah OK, it’s called a career and that’s life, I get it.

Another thing with time, is that it’s really valuable and surprisingly, there is only so much of it. I like not to have many regrets about how it is spent, so watching a role play for an hour then having to hear the exact same thing played over a tape recorder can irritate me slightly. Especially when the vibrations coming from my Blackberry tell me I am missing other vitally important deadlines putting me just a little closer to that text message!

Well with the ticking time and the whole thirtyness thing, next year I will enter the dreaded decade, probably one of the scariest and busiest decades of my life and will have to say goodbye to my twenties. In the 20’s you can be forgiven more, ‘she’s still young’ ‘lots of development’ ‘she’ll learn’. In the 30’s all is not forgiven. At 20 you can turn up late for parties and look cool or at worst have eyes rolled at you then it’s immediately forgotten. At 30 if you turn up late to anything you just seem to be considered unreliable, boring, under the thumb or a mother! I hate being late for anything, now I am, and that’s all I need. Whilst there are many things I would like to be when turning 30, being 3 stone heavier and ante-nataled up is definitely not one of them. Time may be disappearing, but I don’t intend to waste it being the sensible Debbie I am always labelled. If only people got to know me and I would talk more!

In summary to my time dilemma, there are chances worth taking sometimes and I have had many reminders of this recently. Whilst the path of least resistance sounds great in principal and may have been one I adopted in my early 20’s, it’s not one I think I can get away with in my 30’s. Time to grow up unfortunately!