Is There Never Enough Time?
Time is a funny thing. It assumes many shapes.
For starters, along with our health, our relationships, and perhaps a few other things, our time is one of our most valuable assets. We’d do well to spend it wisely.
Notice how I said “spend it wisely”: I’m already talking about time as if it’s money. We spend money. We spend our time. For most of us, money and time are both scarce assets that we need to allocate according to our values. So viewed like that, the analogy holds up.
At the same time, time isn’t very much like money at all. We can always make more money, but we can never make more time. When our money runs out, we can fix that. When our time runs out… well, we’ll all hit that point eventually.
In ProductivityLand, we try to optimize our time: we want to get more done faster. More of the right things, too. We want to eliminate, automate, and delegate. We want to squeeze every drop of time juice from our daily 24 hours. To do this, we use tools like task managers and calendars and techniques like organizing projects and time boxing. These tools and techniques are valuable and I recommend them for everyone—but they’re also not enough.
Because surely the point of all this isn’t to do as much work as we can or to cram as many activities as possible into our days, weeks, months, and years. The Dalai Lama has said the purpose of life is to be happy. Or at least, I presume he did—I used to pass by this quotation on my daily commute in the San Francisco Bay Area:
As we’re talking about our favorite to-do apps or our favorite calendar apps or the best productivity techniques, we should keep in mind that these are just tools. They are tools to help us make the best use of our time—when we’re in getting stuff done mode, that is.
Viewed from ProductivityLand, we can never have enough time. We have values and goals and projects and we want to complete those projects so we can achieve those goals and live in accordance with those values—and doing that faster is better! I don’t mean to sound cynical. Pursuing your goals is one of the most meaningful things you can do, especially if your goals involve contributing to the wonderful society we live in.
But if the purpose of life is to be happy, perpetually feeling like we lack something—time—isn’t the answer. That feeling of “lack” causes stress and unhappiness. Can we have fun and be at ease while we strive to achieve our goals and be better versions of ourselves? In other words, can we enjoy the process?
I find that I need frequent reminders that I actually “have” lots of time. It doesn’t feel like that day to day, when I’m working on my projects. Sometimes it feels like that, when I’m spending time with others purely for the sake of enjoying it, but I spend a fair bit of my time working and while working… no, it doesn’t often feel like that.
That’s why, right after writing this, I’m off for a spa and sauna day with a friend. It’ll be a day of heating up, cooling down, swimming, eating, napping, reading, relaxing, and chatting. Without any devices. Sorry, dopamine.
I used to think of such a day off as preparing myself to work harder afterwards. But these days, I just allow myself to enjoy the time off, without needing it to contribute to anything.
So what time is it for you? Will you be spending most of the coming month in ProductivityLand? Or somewhere resembling this photo? Neither answer is wrong, but eventually a little balance helps.