Have you noticed how time speeds up when you're writing music?
Sometimes I'll spend ten minutes working on a track, yet my wife insists that I've been gone for two hours. Occasionally I start something at say 10pm and work for half an hour, but when I've finished it turns out to be 2am.
By the same token, time can actually run more slowly, like when you're standing in a queue at the Post Office. Even Einstein never fully explained this phenomenon.
ROG.
It's called 'the Zone' and it's a magical place where time does not exist, nor does the world around you. It's like watching a really great movie, or reading an excellent book - except your concentration is focused on creation instead of consumption!
Rog,
wives are like speedometers/odometers in that they help us to establish some relationship between time and the distance covered during it.
I've found that since my wife is gone (ie, there's nobody to open the door and tell me that the past 30 minutes was actually 3 hours) that the situation you describe has multiplied about tenfold. I just spent the past week working on music for what seemed like about half a day.
work expands to fill the time allotted for it. If you have all day to write a song, it will take all day. If you have a week, well...
A week ago Saturday, when I was writing "Wasting My Time", I went up to the studio at 5pm. Other than two interruptions to let the dog out, I was so focused on getting this done that I looked up and it was 3:15am. I had not even had dinner. Those who know me know that the remarkable part of the story is that I did not have dinner, not the time I spent writing and tracking.
Yet the 10 minute delay on the highway where they are resurfacing the highway near my work place drives me nuts.
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There are a couple of names for this state of mind / state of being. One name is "Flow."
A psychologist of high repute has written a book about it which I found fascinating:
http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csikszentmihalyi/dp/0061339202Here he is on TED:
http://blog.ted.com/2008/10/23/creativity_fulf/
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>>>...Even Einstein never fully explained this phenomenon.
Einstein had this to say: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour. That's relativity."
"The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." – Einstein