Quantifying Time — One perspective on how to prioritize your time efficiently
Time has been a topic on my mind quite a bit lately, especially as we all seem to have a lot more of it on our hands since last year. I’ve noticed that as a general rule of thumb, the majority of us have no concept of time as it relates to our mortality. What I mean by that, is that a lot of our decisions do not take into account that we will not be around forever, or that you don’t have an unlimited amount of time available to you. Sure, some of us have taken advantage of the slower lifestyle introduced to us in 2020 and have dedicated more time to doing things we love, but most of us haven’t. Even pre-pandemic, I’m willing to bet that you’ve done something similar, if not the following:
- You skipped hanging out with your parents because you ended up at the bar instead.
- You didn’t call that friend to catch up because you can just do it tomorrow. You didn’t do it when tomorrow came either.
- You never started that hobby you’ve always wanted to do because there just hasn’t been enough time.
If any of the above is a recurring theme, then there’s a good chance you are too busy spending time on the wrong things, or you have this subconscious idea that you are going to be around a lot longer than you really will be so there’s no urgency to do what might be important to you now. I used to do both of these quite often, until I started to quantify my time. What does that mean exactly? Well you look at how many times you do something in a given year and then multiply that out by the expected years remaining in your life. Tim Urban was the first I can find to write about this topic and it really opened my eyes with a few examples. Let’s assume you are currently 30 reading this and will live to 90 years of age, that means:
- If you read 5~ books per year, you have about 300 books left
- If you “treat yo self” once per month, you will have 720 cheat meals left
- If you go watch the Raptors or Lakers once a year, you have 60 games left to attend
That all seems great, and there’s plenty of opportunities remaining… right? How about when you apply the same type of thinking to those important people in your life? Your parents are probably 60, and if they will also live to 90, then you only have about 30 years left with them. For most of us that have moved away from home, you probably don’t see your parents as much as you used to. For me, I go home a few times a year to see my family, which I’ll average out to maybe 10 days annually. If I was to calculate how many days I have left with them, it’s 300. That’s not even a full year. The same exercise can be applied to siblings, friends, and relationships. Do you and your partner only take 1 vacation per year? Well sorry to break it to you, but you’ve got about 60 adventures left in total. Choose those trips wisely. A lot of us walk around with this idea that we have all the time in the world to do what we want, with who we want, but it’s really not true. If anything, it’s quite the opposite.
I don’t say this to depress you, or to be a negative Nancy (is that like being a Karen?). Rather, it’s helped me start to prioritize what matters to me and re-arrange my schedule with who or what I give my time to. I’m not perfect, and it doesn’t always work out the way I am writing it, but I’m trying to spend more time on what’s important to me and less time on things that will have no impact in the future. Trust me when I say that it’s a horrible feeling to look back at something or someone that’s no longer here, and wish you had more time with them.
With that being said, I’ll leave you with a few suggestions of things you can do in your life, and let you come up with what’s going to work best for you: Call your parents more often. Take more vacations. Stop working your ass off. Make the time to prioritize what matters to you. Time is the most important yet scarce currency you have at your fingertips, so choose wisely how you spend it.
