Two weeks ago my granddaughter completely forgot about her Karate Banquet.  So did her mother.  24 hours later tears were shed over the missed opportunity.
She so wanted to go back.  And, nine and half years into her life she came to the realization that yesterday is gone.

On an almost daily basis  I get email, postal communications, and phone calls from various financial wizards claiming that they can predict future events.
They tell me how their past prognostications have led to enourmous “profits” (pun intended). AND for just 199.95 a year I can be positioned to take advantage of  the opportuniites.  BUT WAIT, there is more, IF I sign up in the next 5 minutes not only will they double the offer(2 years instead of one), but they will send a lucky few, ABSOLUTELY FREE,  a set  of special reports that they have spent years researching.

So, these folks knew what was going to happen, but they failed to take advantage of it and now they have to sell their predictions to make money?

There is an old Twilight Zone where a guy receives a letter from a “Swami” predicting the outcome of a ball game.  The letter says, if this prediction comes true,
send in 5 dollars for an even better prediction.  As the story continues the guy keeps sending more and more money and the predictions keep coming true.
Finally, he embezzles funds from his company and goes for one big score from the Swami’s stock prediction.  The next week, he doesn’t show up for work but the
embezzled funds have been returned in full.  A friend who has been skeptically watching all this realizes he could have made a fortune too.  When he tries to locate the Swami,
he learns that the Swami only predicted events with a 50-50 proposition…start with 10,000 letters get 5000 believers(give or take a few), then 2500, then 1250, etc.
The cost of predictions rise as the swami continues to be right and in the end he randomly selects a stock and sends it out to the last few “winners” willing to pay the high price of his final prediction.   When the only media for scam delivery was the U.S. Post Office, the Swami would have been tracked down and sent to jail.   Today, the Swami would be a billionare with no threat of jail time. 

About 5 years ago, I stopped wearing a watch.  It could only tell me what time it WAS, and as my granddaughter can now affirm “you can’t go back”.   I still record my time spent on activities so I can get paid and I can better assess just where all my time went.   But when it comes to planning for tomorrow, I have shifted to an event driven mindset.  Questions of “when will this be done?”, are now answered with as soon as I solve this problem, or as soon as this event occurs.  I can still estimate the amount of time it will take me to achieve something, but in my event driven world, other higher priority events may render the event irrelevant OR speed up OR  prevent completion by a specified time.   Many things must run on schedules, but for the most part, we have machines that deal with these issues requiring adherence to a clock.

On the other hand when it comes to taking full advantage of events in our future, without timing,  it’s a 50/50 proposition.