The halfway point

In most cases, in my experience, the initial half of anything tends to appear longer compared to the latter half. The goal of this article is to provide insights on managing this phenomenon and leveraging it to your benefit in your daily tasks.

Learning from a long wait

When taking 10-hour flights, I often sleep through takeoff, then wake up not knowing for how long I had slept and hoping hours went by. To my dismay, I realized that only 20 minutes had passed since takeoff, leaving me with another challenging 9.40-hour flight ahead. After 1 more hour; time feels extremely long, my claustrophobia kicks in and my mind is spinning: “I‘m done with not even 20% of it and we have 5 or 6 more times what we just flew, ahead of us. My legs hurt already. Let me go for a walk”….
At this juncture, a remarkable transformation begins to occur exponentially: during the second 20% of the flight, a meal is served, my mind starts to get used to the idea of being stuck on seat 33C [1] for hours and the second 20% already feels shorter. Once we hit the halfway mark at 50%, the remaining 5 hours barely suffice to complete that book, take a short nap, and get the meal I’ve been waiting for.
Halfway through, I’m already extremely familiar with the idea of spending 5 hours on a plane, and knowing that the first 5 hours went by reasonably quickly after all, if I look back, I don’t think of…