Hurry up. Time is wasting.
The experts tell us that for those of us who are living in this day and age, there is much more to do in much less time. True, we are living longer than ever, but our lifespans have not kept pace with the number of things there are to do. If they did the experts say that we would need to live to be 342.73 (assuming, of course, that you are not an American trying to learn a foreign language – then you need to add another 36.23 years).
But I am here to help. I have learned how to add immeasurable time to your life (okay, it isn’t really immeasurable – I am going to measure it two paragraphs from now – but is it really going to hurt you to consider it immeasurable for a few more seconds?). It turns out that upon very close examination of our sport, there is some serious time that can be used for other activities. “Where is it?” you ask (yes you did; I heard you). Think. Sorry, you are taking too much time, and we need to be efficient.
The 90-second break, of course. The full minute-and-a-half between games is wasted by almost all squash players. What do we normally do? Sit for a minute? Take a drink? Towel off? How much time do we spend just sitting there when we could be doing something else? Funny you should ask…
Let’s assume that you play three times per week and you play five games per outing (if you are like me, you almost always play five games in social squash – even if someone wins the first three). That’s a total of six minutes of breaks. If you play for the rest of your life (say, the next sixty years), we are talking about 234 hours of time we all could be putting to better use.
Leave it to the Aussies to teach us. When I was first in Australia, I remember walking into a club and noticing that there was a bar right next to the courts. There were a few blokes sitting at the bar, drinking and smoking. It was a bit of a shock to me that one of these guys turned out to be my opponent for an Australian league match.
Truth be told, I started to feel pretty cocky about beating the guy; after all, I had been training pretty hard and this guy was an overweight smoker. I think I got a whole point that first game. Between games, I tried to focus on the match. Between games, he lit up a cigarette. He won the match. I retired to the locker room and threw up.
There are a number of valuable lessons here, but let’s focus on time efficiency (and not on the fact that I clearly wasn’t very good): during the match, my opponent was using the time to do something while I had wasted valuable time simply toweling off and drinking water. He gained about five extra minutes of his life (of course, every cigarette was costing him about seven minutes of his life, so overall he was down two), while I not only spent time in an ultimately futile effort, but I also used up a few crucial minutes of my life getting sick afterward.
Since then, a number of other things have come to mind that can be done in 90 seconds or less: catch up on one’s reading (sure, Jim Courier got criticized for it, but he was just ahead of his time), run a highly efficient meeting, buy tickets on moviephone (hint: have someone else make the call so you can skip over that movie preview at the start), read some email, polish your shoes, make a toast, make long-distance phone calls (and tell your friend that you gotta run, but maybe they could call you later – efficient and cost effective), make a toast, sing happy birthday, see five patients (at least if you are like my doctor: “Hi. You look good. See you next year.”), or dump your tech stocks.
Now some of these will require some coordination and a staff in order to pull them off during the 90-second break, but that’s okay – just be a one-minute manager (and have 30 seconds left over!).
On one of my final weekends Down Under, I was playing in the Australian Open against Chris Dittmar who was #2 in the world at the time, behind Jahangir, and let’s just say that I don’t think he was too worried about playing me.
He decided that it might be amusing to see how fit I really was. So he made me run and run and run some more. Then there was a bit more running. After twelve minutes of running and only four points completed, I remember wondering if it would be more embarrassing to default or to faint on Australian television. Finally, the first game was over, and I was knackered.
Dittmar, on the other hand, decided that he might be able to use the between game method to get in a workout. So he started doing court sprints. I took one look at that and did something that made me realize how far I had come since I first arrived in Australia. You see, this time, instead of waiting until the match was over, I threw up between games. Efficiency, mate. Efficiency.
