The Dawn of a New Night; Why Do We, Our Companies and Our Society Let Half of Our Time Go to Waste?
The soft blue glow of the computer screen, the tapping on the keyboard and the accompanying hardware hum will be my world for the next several hours - a world of self-imposed isolation and silence. Phones will not ring, nor doorbells chime. Kids will not interrupt. There's no laughter from a distant television or pounding beat from a stereo. The first intrusion I can expect will be the sound of a van pulling away from the mailbox after delivering my Washington Post at 5:10.</br></br>But by then I will have taken advantage of one of the most valuable untapped resources we have as a species: time. Specifically, nighttime.</br></br>To those who know my early morning ways, I am abnormal. Not in a deranged way, but in the "major percentile group" sense. And they are right. To them, I appear to have a sleeping disorder because my day begins between 3 and 4 a.m. and ends around 9 p.m. I readily acknowledge that I'm nowhere near the bulge in the bell curve of sleeping habits.</br></br>Despite the apparent eccentricity of it, there is great potential value in these predawn hours: value to the individual, to our companies and to our society. And yet, with all of our new technology and our burning desire to reinvent and reengineer our lives and our world, we seem to be letting our most precious resource - time - slip through our fingers.</br></br>Expensive revenue-producing, life-enhancing resources sit idle or near-idle in the darkness. Office buildings, computers, medical facilities, power plants, libraries, research centers, telecommunications networks, airplanes, trucks, educational facilities, golf courses, retail shops - almost everything - go from assets to liabilities as we, ironically, search for ways to do more with less and become more competitive.