There’s so much I want to do before I die, and nowhere near enough time to do it.
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Hi Hera,
I’ve recently gotten into consistently going to the gym, and rowing, this year. Over 100 workouts, and consistent rowing trainings per week. I’m stoked! I made a tough decision to stop boxing during lunch, in order to focus on rowing and gym. I’m pretty stoked about my lifestyle, but…
There are dozens of unread books on my to-be-read list. There are unwritten poems and short stories. There are un-made DJ sets I’d like to spend hours working away on. There are also volunteering commitments I’d like to get involved in.
Please, how do I manage the mental process of opportunity costs?
I wish I had more hours in the day… if only the earth rotated slower (with all respect to natural physics)!
Sincerely,
Temporally Challenged
Dear Temporally Challenged,
Not only is the earth not rotating slower, it’s actually rotating faster than usual for complicated gravitational factors relating to the proximity of the moon, costing us valuable milliseconds that could otherwise be spent pumping iron and reading Dostoevsky. Even the solar system isn’t exempt from shrinkflation.
Thanks for your question. I don’t know what sort of disease you have which makes you want to spend your lunchtimes exercising instead of mindlessly scrolling your newsfeed, but good for you. It’s nice to get a problem where someone’s so enthusiastic about the abundance of opportunities this world has to offer they’re having to earnestly reckon with the fact of their own mortality.
The bad news is that you are going to die. Not only will you die, but you’ll die without experiencing more than a fraction of the world’s bounty, and no amount of pomodoro timers or productivity hacks will make this any less devastating. So how do you make the most of the time that you have?
There are two ways to think about this..
The first is by accepting that life is scandalously brief, there’s a limit to what one person can meaningfully accomplish, and you need to prioritise the things that matter most before you’re dead.
The second is accepting that life is meant to be lived, not ergonomically optimised for maximum efficiency.
Let’s start with the big picture. Your question is probably beyond the scope of a single advice column, but I do have a book recommendation for you. Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks is an excellent book about deciding how to allocate your time. He makes a good case that choosing the areas of your life in which you want to excel also means choosing the areas of your life which will suffer. As Burkeman points out, if you really want to write that novel or build that canoe, the only way to get it done is to prioritise it at the expense of your never-ending list of chores and responsibilities. That doesn’t mean you can get away with ignoring the dishes in your singleminded pursuit of greatness. But you need to be intentional about the amount of time you devote to this stuff, because you are what you do, and what you don’t want to be is “someone who is really fast at replying to emails.”
However, there’s such a thing as being too optimised. Time isn’t a currency to be invested, or a resource to be exploited. Time is first and foremost, our home.
In the words of Larkin:
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
It would be a shame, I think, to be so clinical about your ambitions, that you don’t leave any time for laying around on your ass “totally watching television.”
In general, I think it’s empowering to make a few big decisions about how you want to spend your life, and quietly work towards them. But accidents and failures often pave the way for big revelations which change our lives in ways we can’t anticipate. We’re only just beginning to grapple with the consequences of living in a world in which it’s possible to completely eradicate boredom, and I worry about what this means for our attention spans. Failure can lead to profound emotional discoveries. Boredom engenders creativity. Childhood is precious, precisely because it’s wasted. All of which is to say, things will go wrong with your plans, and that’s fine. There’s no shame in abandoning a dream which no longer suits you. The big thing is to have a dream.
I think there’s also a good case to be made for delaying a few pleasures. Don’t trudge your way through the entire canon of Russian literature at age 16, just because it’s on your list. There’s always the risk you die young without ever having read Crime and Punishment. But life isn’t to be gotten out of the way early. It’s fine to save a few aspirations for the correct psychological moment. Maybe that solo trip to Nicaragua hits harder at 40 than it does at 19.
My one boring time management tip is to get into audiobooks. In my opinion, there are very few activities in life (cooking, cleaning, gardening, exercising) that can’t be improved by a dramatic retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. So next time you hop on the rowing machine, cue up Four Thousand Weeks and give it a try.
