Fantastic Time Management

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How else do you keep your commitments to 31 girls in one day?

Characters are often pressed for time. Maybe they overbook themselves for a specific time period, or maybe they just have a very busy life general, what with having the Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World all the time. Perhaps they have a deadline that is just physically impossible to meet in the allotted time.

Well, not to worry: All they have to do is create more time, using Magic and Powers or Applied Phlebotinum.

Favorite Fantastic Time Management methods include Time Travel, Year Inside, Hour Outside, and Narnia Time, however there can also be other ways of accomplishing this. This is often a form of Mundane Utility.

Examples of Fantastic Time Management include:

Anime and Manga

• In Mahou Sensei Negima, Negi Springfield uses both the Time Travel and the Year Inside, Hour Outside solution:
  • In order to be able to both do his school teaching duties and go through a special magic/combat training, Negi begins to use his mentor Evangeline's special resort located in a Pocket Dimension where one day is equivalent to one hour in our world.
  • In the Mahora Festival arc, Negi ends up majorly overbooking his schedule. He is given a Time Travel device by Chao in order to allow him to meet all his commitments, time jumping three times on the first day alone. Of course, because this deprives him of sleep, he then also uses the aforementioned Evangeline's resort to be able to rest from all these activities.
    • Which was exactly what Chao expected him to do.

Comic Books

• In an issue of Love and Capes, superhero (and accountant) Crusader forgets to do his own taxes until 11:30 p.m. on April 15. He has to have them finished and in the mail by midnight. Even using his super-speed powers, he is unable to finish them until 2 a.m. the next day. This is no problem, since he lives in the Eastern time zone; He just flies at super speed to the west coast, and mails his taxes in before midnight Pacific time.

Fan Works

• In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Harry has a 26-hour sleep schedule. Professor McGonagall solves this by giving him a Time-Turner. Harry is quite unnerved by this...

Say, Professor McGonagall, did you know that time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter? Why yes it does! Did you know that one kilogram of antimatter encountering one kilogram of matter will annihilate in an explosion equivalent to 43 million tons of TNT? Do you realize that I myself weigh 41 kilograms and that the resulting blast would leave A GIANT SMOKING CRATER WHERE THERE USED TO BE SCOTLAND?

... but eventually gets quite used to it, to the point where he has to be magically restricted from using it more often than the intended two turns per day.

• In Radaslab's Harry Potter fic The Harem War, Harry's days are filled with so many tasks—head-of-state duties as the Duke of Charenwell, flight training in the Charenwell air force, keeping his two dozen wives satisfied, and more—that he has to loop through every day three times using a time turner in order to accomplish everything he needs to.
• Twice during the course of the Harry Potter fic White Knight, Grey Queen Harry and Pansy use a time turner to loop through a week of "real" time to get multiple weeks of subjective time for training.

Film

• Done in Megamind. During some hero-villain banter with Megamind, Metro Man realizes that he has been doing the same thing for years. He uses his super speed to go out, think to himself, and read several self-help books. All this time, he's moving so fast that time appears frozen to him. It's done to ridiculous extents, but it makes sense seeing as how it IS a parody.
• In Bill and Teds Bogus Journey, Bill and Ted exploit their time machine to get a few extra years' guitar practice in before the Battle of the Bands. This despite the previous film having explicitly established that this was impossible…
  • Obviously, they finally figured out they could just call a date that used to be a few years earlier, which would now have also moved forward to the correct date after they spent those few years learning to actually play well

Literature

• In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione Granger uses daily time travel to take more classes than would be otherwise possible. At the end she decides it's too much of a hassle and drops the extra subjects to have a more normal schedule.
• Time Machine story "The Time Machine Twins the Jamboree". Bob Tucker (who is a Boy Scout) needs to be at Jamboree West and Jamboree East, but they're being held at the same time. "Brains" Baines comes up with the idea of using the Time Machine to move him from one event to the other, and taking him to a deserted beach in the 40th century to sleep between appearances.
• The Dragonriders of Pern books have several examples of people using their dragons' time-jumping ability to do this.
  • Jaxom does it a few times throughout The White Dragon, mostly for relatively trivial reasons.
  • In Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern, Moreta does it repeatedly, to the point of exhaustion and eventual death, to deliver a plague cure to everyone who needs it.
• In the Discworld novel Thief of Time, the title character can make time flow faster or slower for himself relative to the world around him. He regularly uses this ability for mundane everyday schedule management.
  • Mr. Soak, the milkman, does this. Somehow, the milk is always on your doorstep at exactly 7 am. For everyone. Turns out Soak is actually Kaos, and can stop time as well.

Live-Action TV

• In the 1980s Twilight Zone episode "A Little Peace and Quiet", a harried housewife finds a magic sundial that allows her to stop and restart time. She uses it to literally make time for herself, enjoying a peaceful breakfast or leisurely shopping for groceries while time is stopped for everyone else. Everything is perfect until nuclear war breaks out and she stops time while a missile is 10 feet above her head. She will have to choose between dying with everyone else and living her life forever trapped between two instants of time.

Tabletop Games

• This is how Tezzeret solves the labyrinth in the Magic: The Gathering novel Test of Metal. He harnesses Silas Renn's clockworking powers to explore every nook and cranny of the maze with an infinite number of alternate-timeline versions of himself.
  • Quyzl was told by his mentor to "make more time" for his studies.

Video Games

• In Touhou, Sakuya often use her time manipulation power to speed up housework.

Western Animation

• In Dexter's Laboratory, there's an episode where Dexter has only one minute before the school bus arrives and he hasn't done his homework yet, so he uses a time-extending helmet to turn 30 seconds into 30 minutes to get everything done. It turns out to be in vain as that day it snowed and school was canceled.