Time, Our Most Valuable Resource
by Jack Guarnieri, Jersey Jack Pinball & PinballSales.com
As I write this it’s RePlay’s Key Snodgress’ birthday and I’m sitting in the United Club in Boston on a foggy Sunday morning, returning home from a pinball show.
My flight to Newark is delayed four hours because of some weather conditions yesterday that caused the flight crew to “time out.” Not a fan of wasted time, I figured this forced down-time offered the perfect opportunity to write this month’s column, making it a bit of a birthday gift for Key since I’ll be making her deadline.
The delay got me thinking about wasted time and the first thing that popped into my mind was driving to work. Maybe an audio book, podcast or something else could help you turn some of that into productive time.
Commuting to work is on a lot of minds today since the work-from-home revolution seems to be losing out to the get-back-to-the-office management. Of course, there are benefits to both. For example, in-office offers regular face-to-face interaction and idea sharing with co-workers, while remote work saves time that would have been lost to the commute. The latter can have a dramatic impact on quality of life. Post-Covid, a number of companies are trying a hybrid system. But it’s hard, if not impossible, to do many jobs from home. Take a firefighter or welder, for example. For those people, there’s limited opportunity to work from home.
About five minutes of my four hours have now passed and I’m looking around the airline club full of people. A lot of folks are passing the time drinking, eating and doing whatnot on their electronic devices. For many people, being here is terribly quiet.
Time is such a valuable thing. You can make more money but you can’t make more time. It seems a shame to waste any of it.
Young people today seem to have little time to waste being so much busier in their lives than when I was their age. Older people seem to have more time and less to keep them busy. I guess a good way to live is to always keep busy doing something, no matter your age, so you don’t feel like you wasted your time.
That said, I also welcome unexpected quiet moments to reflect, meditate, relax, pray and appreciate. That may not feel like “productive” time but it is! Time like that is truly well spent.
None of us know how much of this precious commodity we’ll get, so use your time wisely. It’s time for me to wrap up Key’s “present” with a pretty bow and figure out how to use the rest of my unplanned airport break.
I’m down ten minutes with the rest of this long wait still to go. Maybe I’ll get a start on next month’s column! Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with this: It’s been said that time is money but spending your time wisely is priceless.
Jack Guarnieri started servicing electro-mechanical pinball machines in 1975 and has been involved in every phase of the amusement game business since then. He was an operator in NYC, then began a distributorship in 1999, PinballSales.com, selling coin-op to the consumer market. In January of 2011, he founded Jersey Jack Pinball (named after his RePlay Magazine pen name), which builds award-winning, full-featured, coin-op pinball machines. Email Jack at [email protected].