I have no time

How do I find enough time to do everything I should?

Stop for a moment. Think about it. The answer to that question sometimes feels automatic. When I pause and reflect more deeply, I realize this is another of our brain’s dangerous habits—perhaps the most dangerous.

The truth is, at any given moment, we can count on one hand the tasks we absolutely must complete. Sometimes even fewer than a single hand’s fingers. Many of these “musts” could actually be “shoulds” or “coulds.” We can choose to do or not do anything, as long as we’re ready to accept the consequences, whether positive or negative. This, I believe, is a truth that, while it might sound extreme, is more accurate than we’re willing to admit.

“I don’t have time” is often the last resort of excuses we use to avoid the responsibility of choosing how to spend our most valuable asset, the only one we possess: our time on earth. Ironically, this excuse wants to convince us of the opposite—that we don’t have enough.

Some time ago, on Wait But Why blog, I read two posts that offer fresh perspectives. They raise a simple question: Are we perhaps overlooking two key aspects of our time? Namely, what we’ve done with it so far, for better or worse; and that, regardless of its length, it’s a finite resource. We cannot know how much we have, but it’s limited, no doubt about that.

I’ve had a side project in mind for a while: creating a semi-interactive page, a visualization that serves me as an elegant reminder of what all my time has been and what it still might be. How much more could it be. The result is my Life in Weeks.

I reiterate it here, though it sounds obvious: that page will never be final. When it is, it means I’ll be at the very end. I hope to reach that point after a memorable journey.

We do not have little time, but we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing.
Seneca, “De Brevitate Vitae”