Gaining "Tempo"

"Gaining a Tempo" has been embedded into all my actions so much so that I am totally perplexed. Finally, today I was trying to analyze the reason behind.

This whole thing dates back to 1987-88-89 when I was in my early teens and was barely out of school( I studied 11th 12th in college), I was into playing chess. Even I won a state championship in one of those years and my photos and interviews flashed in local newspaper. Those days were golden days for me. I would sleep chess, think chess, eat chess and very conveniently studied chess(Needless to mention I ignored my course studies very conveniently). We had a coach(he was a state employee and was teaching chess to kids free of cost) would come to our house once a week and teach us chess. There I learn t this word "tempo". Before that, we used to refer a tempo to an auto rickshaw that is used for transportation. This word suddenly caught my fancy. In chess "Tempo" meant when you have a certain advantage over your opponent by virtue of your move. In other words, the opponent may take one or more moves to neutralize the advantage that you are already having. Many a times a tempo leads to significant advantage and may lead to a piece gain and eventual win..

In my daily life, I keep all my stuff crammed together in a small place keeping the rest of the empty space very empty and un-utilized. I do it thinking that I have a tempo over the space! So, if I get a lots of stuff tomorrow then I don't have to re-arrange everything. This according to me is a tempo. On the other hand my husband will try to evenly scatter everything through the entire available space. This often leads to changing or re-arranging everything very often as we add new things. He would pull the bed to the center of the room, put everything away from wall and cover the whole space.

I also do something like this at work too. I tend to work very hard for a very short period of time keeping the rest of the time as empty as possible. I don't think this is a good habit though..