The Berenstain Bears Catch the Bus

The Berenstain Bears Catch the Bus: A Tell the Time Story (Step into Reading, Step 2) by Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain

The bears' alarm goes off at 7 am. They sleep through it. The school bus driver gets up and starts driving the bus. A few minutes before 8, mom wakes up the bears and they rush to catch the bus at 8. This is an easy reader book that is good for a read, but gets old fast.  The rhyming and rhythm are a bit forced and not quite consistent.

Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception

Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception by Claudia Hammond

How good are we at perceiving time? Why does time seem to slow to a crawl at some instances, while it sprints at other times? When young, time seems to pass slowly. Though when older, it seemed to go by faster. (This may naively seem to be based on "percentage of life", but that doesn't pan out.) When we are having fun, time goes by quickly. When we are bored, time is slow. A stressful life-or-death incident may appear to last much longer than the actual clock time. Estimating time can be a difficult challenge. Sometimes we can do a good job. However, without external cues it can become more and more challenging to estimate how long has passed. Time is viewed differently in different languages. In English, "before" is usually to the left. In other languages and cultures it differs. There are people that view time "visually". Some people see time as something that flows, while others see themselves moving through time. You can spend a lot of time analyzing how time is perceived.

Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done

People often complain about not having enough time to accomplish what they want to do. Yet, when delving into their detailed time usage, they find that they end up wasting a lot of their time. Off the Clock recommends being mindful of time usage in order to accomplish what we need and have more free time. 

It is tempting to pick up the phone to scan some random social media when we have a free moment. However, very few people would mention "spending three hours scanning social media" as something they want to accomplish for the day. Even though exercising only takes a few minutes, most people claim they don't have enough time to fit it into their schedule. By tracking our detailed activities each day, we can get an idea where our time really is going. We may find that we are spending less time working than we think. 

In choosing the areas to spend our time, it is often valuable to block of time, such as the start of day to engage in our high-value individual activities. We should also know how things typically work. If meetings run late, don't schedule them back to back. If it often takes longer than expected to go to a soccer game, add in buffer time. Make valuable use of the time that you have. Spending time socializing with coworkers can be help accomplish more than working through lunch. "Appearing busy" does not provide as much value as we think. Accomplishing things does. Even in a marriage, we have picked somebody that we want to "suffer the least" with. We will have challenges with our time. We can make the best of them.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

The average human lives 4000 weeks. What is the best way to use that time? Rather than advocate ways to squeeze maximum productivity out the time. This book advocates that we instead pick fewer things to do. Picking what to do can be more important than picking what not to do. An example was given of "Inbox-zero". If we respond to all emails immediately, we may find that we receive more emails. Some of the emails we take this effort to respond to may be resolved without our response. Our efforts can just lead to more work.

What is our goal in finishing things? Do we hope to finally have time at the end to do other things? Why don't we spend time doing some of those other things now? 

The other does provide a few suggestions for improving our time management. We can serialize the things we work on. Have one small list (with 10 items or less) of things that we actively work on. The overall to-do list may have many more things. However, we don't give them any effort until they move to the "active" list. We can also serialize what we do. Focus on one thing at a time to completion. Then go to the next thing. It is ok to fail at something. Just make it explicit. It is also useful to have a list of things that are "done". Other suggestions have more to do with how to deal with life as it unfolds. Looks for bits of interesting or novel things in the boring. Cultivate "instant" generosity. We have a short time to live. We should live it the best we can.

168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

A day has 168 hours. How do you spend them? Laura Vanderkam invites you to explore your time usage. People tend to do a poor job estimating where they are spending their time. Often those that claim to work crazy amounts of hours do much less actual work. (Much of the "work" is actually personal or social behavior.) Multitasking can result in little progress in either task. However, "intelligent multipurpose behavior" can be beneficial. (For example, combining service and social work.) Little things like responding to a new email alert can end up sucking a large amount of time before you are able to get back to where you were. Trying to work form home and watch kids at the same time can be a recipe for not doing a good job at either. Finding a job that you truly enjoy makes the work less "work".
The author tends to be more focused on females balancing work and job, though there is material for everyone. It was also written during the "great recession", and thus has plenty of examples of "forced" job changes.
It is important to look at what you are doing and how that accomplishes your goals. Often people will say they would love to have a little more time to do something, but given the time they don't do it. If there is a strong desire to accomplish something, we can often find time to do it. (But alas, we will often spend more time on the phone or TV.) Switching from full time to part time work often does not significantly change the amount of time spent with family. Ironically, stay at home parents only spend a little more interactive time with their children than working parents. (The extra time is often spent doing other activities while the children are on their own.) It is useful to look at our core competencies and considering outsourcing other things. It is fine to do things that we are not great at because we want to. But, even things like laundry may be more efficiently done by others than us.

Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You're So Tired

Internal Time divides the discussion of time into 24 chapters. It presents a number of fictional and semi-factual stories of people in various "odd time" situations as it discusses how time impacts us in our lives. The human clock is almost set to 24 hours. However, there are slight differences, and the body relies on external queues (sunrise) to guide us on the daily schedule. Teenagers tend to arise later, and gradually arise earlier each year until late middle age. (Women actually start this schedule a little ahead of men.) Birds use an internal clock in order to guide their long migrations. Some people may have conditions that cause them to wake up much earlier than normal. Without sensory perceptions, it can be hard to accurately keep track of time.
Time is quite an interesting phenomenon. Mammals may have even evolved to dominate the night (since the air, sea and land were already taken.) Being warm blooded allowed them to be active when other cold blooded animals lacked energy. Later, mammals went back to the day time. However, man was still created innovations like houses and light to continue to dominate the night.

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

When posits the thesis that "when" you do something can be as a more important than how you do it (or what you do.) Sometimes, bad timing can result in significantly different outcomes. Somebody that begins their career during a recession is likely to end up significantly behind somebody that started during an economic boom. Similarly, time of day can impact the decision making process. (Perhaps the Lucitania was sunk because the captain was not thinking well during the afternoon.) Different people have different times of peak decision making ability. Finding the time can help to make better decisions. Naps can also be very helpful in increasing productivity. (The author laments the ending of the Spanish siesta.) People like to hear the "bad news" first before hearing the good - yet we tend to preface bad news by telling the good. There are many other areas that can be helped by paying head to "when" things are done.

I was Especially interested in the books on time that he recommended:
168 hours - laura candercamp
A geography of time - Robert V Levine
Daily Rituals. How artists work
Internal Time
The Dance of Life - Edward T Hall

Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation

What is time? That is a question the Alan Burdick tries to answer in Why Time Flies. Dictionaries often include a somewhat circular definition of time. We know what it is and we can sense its passage, yet it doesn't seem to be a physical sense like touch or smell. It feels that time passes slower when we our younger, but then speeds up as we get older. Some studies have "proven" this, yet there have also been flaws in the studies. "New" events do appear to take longer than repeated events. This may be do to the more resources that are spent processing the newness than are needed for reprocessing the old. The brain also does a lot of "tricks" to make the real world appear as we expect it. When there is a small delay between the time you touch a key and the character appears on a screen, the brain correlates those with being instantaneous events. If a character then appears instantly upon keypress, the brain will interpret that as happened. "Time" may pass in an orderly manner. However, their are a lot of "tricks" that the brain pulls in our interpretation of the passing of events. This book does a good job in investigating many of these tricks and pointing out that the science behind time is still in its infant stage.