There is a time in your life when you realize: you may have a serious obsession with time. To help you decipher whether you have this or not, here are common symptoms that you could have experienced or are experiencing. Please feel welcome to add to the list if you have experienced something else that has not been included on the list.
1. Your mother bought you a watch at a young age because you wouldn’t stop asking what time it was, and after you received that watch, it was the best thing in the world. Now you constantly check your wrist. If the watch happens to be somewhere else or it died and you haven’t had a chance to buy a new one, you go absolutely crazy.
2. You can’t live without some form of a clock being around. There needs to be something where you can check the time – even the clock on a stove or in the car – to make you feel comforted and certain that the world isn’t falling apart.
3. You don’t eat decent meals because every second counts and you have more important things to do that take up too much time cooking. This goes the same for sleep.
4. People get annoyed at you because you’re constantly asking what time it is.
5. When you first wake up in the morning, you immediately check the time.
6. Before you go to sleep, you check what time it is. And if you can’t sleep, you keep checking the time and even remember the last one you checked so you know how late you stayed up.
7. You always take a moment to plan out your day – either just by calculating it in your mind or making a schedule or calendar. You approximate or plan exactly how long it will take you to do certain activities and whether you’ll have any time to relax a little bit before you have to do homework. Throughout the day, if you’ve made a calendar, you check it to make sure you’re on track.
8. You start timing everything you do, making sure that you’re only doing it for a certain amount of time whether it’s taking a nap, reading, homework, playing games, watching TV shows, or even going out somewhere.
9. When things don’t go according to plan, you freak out.
10. You know exactly how long all your daily activities take you to do such as taking shower, brushing your teeth, using the bathroom, picking out clothes, and so on and so forth.
11. You don’t check your iPhone, Smartphone, or whichever device you have because you’re wondering if anyone texted you. You check it for the time. And sometimes it becomes such a habit that you have to check it several times within a minute because you didn’t register it the first few times.
12. You really dislike wasting time.
13. You get to an appointment early – perhaps five to fifteen minutes, and if the person you’re meeting isn’t there a few minutes before the appointed time, you think they’re late, something happened, or you got the time or place wrong. You keep checking your watch and wandering if you should call the person or just go home, and then you realize that technically, the person isn’t even late yet and you need to calm down.
14. If you’re in a room and there’s no clock, even if you have a clock on your preferred device, you can’t stand being in the room – especially a classroom.
15. A little less than half of your conversations will evolve around the idea of time.