OCTOBER 17 — Malaysians are weird. We behave as if we have 34 hours a day, so we spend that extra 10 hours lazing around contemplating why one cloud looks like a durian and another like a popiah, after which we lament our lack time to take a s***. 

When given deadlines, we laugh them off as a joke but we strive to beat red lights like we’re saving not merely two minutes but our children’s souls.  

Our kopitiam talk is so serious, like we’re modern-day Aristotles explicating life wisely fulfilled, but if we were only given three hours to live? Our top priority would be to hunt down as many Pokemon creatures as possible. In short, our time management sucks.

In this aspect I envy Singaporeans. Those folks are obsessed with time. Our spitting stone fish-lion owning neighbours act as if 24 hours a day is 20 hours too few to do what they need to do. 

Because apart from ensuring all of them on the island make a billion dollars in their lifetime, they’ll never rest from their labours until they colonise a galaxy and name it Kiasu Centauri.

That said, Malaysians will hire a Singaporean Minister of Cuisine & Good Taste before we ever take time management seriously. Over our dead curry-laksa loving bodies. 

This is partially why my department recently ran some workshops on the topic. We felt our students needed it. The paradox is that any student who looks forward to attending a time management class and actually makes it? S/he’s probably good at managing time already. 

Alas, s/he is also a fiction of our imagination. Malaysian students who manage their time well don’t exist. When told they have to attend a “personal development” workshop on managing time, they call their bomohs or priests and demand spiritual intervention. 

Furthermore, 99 per cent of Bolehland’s college students have only two goals in life 1) Get their degree and 2) Don’t die. Because they barely have goals — how (or even why) would they manage their time?

Hence, the need for boring people like me to run classes on how not to end up spending 25 hours banging out emojis and acronyms while getting worked up because their phone batteries are dying.

Zoned out

Malaysian students live somewhere between Delhi and Athens. Or at least their body-clocks do. If you need them to be on time, this is what you do: You secretly steal all their watches and phones and reset the clock four to six hours faster.

I recall some morning lectures I used to give. This one time, class began at 9am. At 11.30am (!), a few students strolled in like they were walking into a 7-Eleven to buy milk. I’m like, why not come in after dinner tomorrow night?

One of my teachers used to tell me that if you’re five minutes early for an appointment, you’re late. Get your He-Man watching ass to the place a full 15 minutes ahead of time. 

Today? If students are 15 hours late, they’re considered early. I sure hope none of them become football referees.

Procrastination is the new sexy. Unless a soul-devouring demon is pointing a hellfire-spear at our heads telling us to finish that assignment at least three days before the deadline, we’d never work on it. 

As a college lecturer let me tell you about the tragedy of assignment submission season: It’s a very sad season. Why? Because inevitably near the due date many students will suffer the loss of their uncles, grandmas and pet alligators.

“Please — sob sob — Sir, can you — sob sob — give me an extra week to finish my assignment?” I’m always tempted to ask, But are you sure your aunt won’t be crushed by a truck later on?

Here are two ideas for those of you who always need to attend funerals during assessment time. First, willpower is like a muscle. Use it or lose it. 

If you find you need to drop your pants and shag something the moment you see a Victoria’s Secret storefront, then clearly you’ve got problems. Start small. Go to the gym. Read a few paragraphs of a book other than Facebook. Write one page of that assignment that’s due the next century. Whatever works, dude.

Secondly, willpower is like a battery. You need to re-charge after a long day. The good news is that it’s quite simple. Sleep and a bar of Cadbury’s will work fine. The bad news is you need to use your rejuvenated willpower to flush your damn phone down the toilet, or else it’ll all go to waste (see below).

WhatsApp is life is WhatsApp

It’s no longer how often our students are on WhatsApp — it’s how often they’re not. Social media shouldn’t be named social media anymore; better to call it King of Kings and Lord of Lords. It won’t be long now before infants come out of their mummy’s wombs screaming, “Wi-fi password!! Now, dammit Now!! Waahhhhh!!”

Our lives have become a never-ending stream of FB, Twitter and WhatsApp updates occasionally interrupted by annoying things like meal-times, family members and the need to breathe.

Thanks to WhatsApp, Malaysia’s lepak culture has been virtualised. Like a virus rendered air-borne by mutation, lepak-ing has morphed throughout the nation via social media.

In the past, lepak-ing is seen as a waste of time. But today if you don’t spend more than 17 waking hours on your phone looking at photos of artsy nasi lemak and cat pics, you’re nothing but a loser. 

If you’re gone four minutes from a group chat that has gone on for four weeks about which pasar malam has the best fried chicken, your friends file a Missing Persons report.

It used to be that Facebook was considered the greatest time-waster in the universe; at least people then still distinguished between being on and off FB. Nowadays, WhatsApp (and, increasingly, SnapChat) has taken the place of life itself.

Wake up in the morning, first thing to do is check WhatsApp. Breakfast, lunch and dinner? These exist merely to enable the body to continue being on WhatsApp. Sex? It’s to reproduce more WhatsApp contacts. War? It’s anytime the Wi-Fi goes down.

Nobody attends “lectures” anymore; these are now dreary spaces during which WhatsApp chats need to be unfortunately disrupted. Meetings? They’re like lectures only it’s conducted with richer folks sitting round a table.

Point is, social media collapses the already fragile distinction between Urgent and Important. Right now there is nothing more urgent than the green number on our phone screens telling us that new messages are in. If we’re making wild passionate love, a single beep could stop us. That and each time a new Game of Thrones episode comes on.

That’s the first deception of the urgent. It cuts into our lives effortlessly.

The second deception is that we always equate the urgent with the important i.e. what’s important to us is simply what is urgent. That is utterly and completely messed up. 

It’s the reason why spending time with family is as rare as a purple tiger. It’s why the only workouts we do is take the stairs. It’s why the task of personal reflection is limited to the mirror and those few “inspiring” seconds we see a poster on Twitter saying that Life is Wonderful Journey or some such mushy horse dung.

Time management? Forget it.

Our students may as well sign up for a course, confess to the marketing rep that there’s no way in fish ball heaven they’ll finish their assignments on time, and get their money back on the spot. That would, if nothing else, save everyone a lot of time.

For those who are interested, the author would be happy to conduct a one — or two-hour workshop on managing time. His fee is a very reasonable US$10,000 per session. Alternatively, a nice lunch would suffice.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.