Time

It’s the only thing that matters

Today is the untold potential of tomorrow, the best of yesterday, and the wonder of the moment all at the same time.
Control your day – what you need to do, at the detriment to all else, is accomplish your goals first
A quarter (3 months) is 1% of 25 years.
1000 months is all you get.
168 hours, 1440 minutes, 86400 seconds
The only truly scarce resource is time.
Parkinson’s law: a task will shrink or expand to the time allocated for it.
Own your schedule.
People overestimate what they can do in a year, but underestimate what they can do in a decade.
The small wins and the big wins take the same amount of time.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
There are only 3 days, yesterday, today, and someday. Yesterday is history, what did you learn that you can bring to today. If you focus on today, someday will take care of itself.

The only truly scarce resource is time. Love is abundant. Money is abundant. Everything else is abundant but you only get 1000 months to live.

Does that number surprise you a little? One thousand months works out to be 83.3 years, approximately the expected lifespan of people in developed countries. If you’re 18, that means you’ve lived 216 of those months already. If you’re 46, that’s 552. You’re 79? You’ve lived 948. If you’re 84 or older, you’re into bonus time. That’s not very long is it?

But let’s say medicine continues to advance, and you’re confident you will live to 100, that makes dividing your life into manageable chunks much easier. You can divide your life into four quarters, 25 years each. You can also divide each of those years into quarters, of 3 months each. If you do that, then you get 100 quarters in every 25 years (4 quarters a year x 25 = 100 quarters). Another way to think about that is one quarter of a year, 3 months, is 1% of 25 years. So every quarter that passes, or every season change if you prefer to think of it that way, is another 1%.

In that 1% is 13 weeks. There’s a lot you can do in 13 weeks, but each week can be broken down into hours. For every week you get a total of 168 hours, and as you know you get 24 hours in each day.

That said the reality is you only get a little more than 16 1/2 hours a day. Sure, there are 24 hours total, but you’re sleeping for 7 and a half of them roughly. So the reality is, if you sleep for 7 hours and 20 minutes, the other 16 hours and 40 minutes can be broken down into 100 ten minute blocks.

Now that’s something you can wrap your head around. What did I learn in the last 10 minutes. What did I do in the last 10 minutes. If I try to remember, how many blocks did I waste being entertained by my phone, or TV? How many hours did I spend just sitting there staring at a shiny screen flashing pictures at me? 100 blocks a day. 100 quarters in 25 years. 1000 months in a lifetime. That’s a scary thought.

So how are you going to spend your next block?

I’m hoping you now realize how little time we really have to accomplish your life’s work, to do what you want to do in this life. Use your time to achieve your goals, to get what you want out of life. Let me say it again in a slightly different way:

What you need to do, at the detriment to all else, is accomplish your goals first.

The way you do this is by controlling your time.

Spending the time you have working on the things you want to accomplish, first before everything else. I get it, you have a job, and there are things related to that job that you don’t have control over. You have to work. Fine, no problem.

We’ve already established you are awake for 16 hours and 20 minutes. Lets say you spend 8 hours at work, and another 4 doing personal and family stuff like eating, dressing, showering, cleaning, whatever. That adds up to 11 to 12 hours. You still have 4 to 5 hours left. This is where the real difference is made.

What you choose to do in those hours is going to make the difference for you. You do have control over that time. Sure, you’re going to be tired from the other 12 hours of stuff you were doing, but if you want to break out of any cycle, it’s how you use that time that matters.

Let’s break it down even more and say you can only spend one hour per day on your goals, your future. If you do that every day for a year, that’s 365 hours. If you take 365 and divide by 40, the number of work hours in a week, that one hour turns into the equivalent of 9 weeks of work. That’s over 2 months of work! One hour = 2 months. How much could you accomplish with an extra 2 months? That’s some magic, simply by controlling your time. You must own your schedule.

When you have tasks to accomplish, be careful about how much time you allocate to completing it. Just think back to your school days. If you have 3 weeks to finish that essay or project, it will take you 3 weeks to complete that essay or project. If you only had 2 days for that exact same essay or project, it would only take 2 days.

This is Parkinson’s law, and it applies to everything you do: a task will shrink or expand to the time allocated for it. So be very careful when setting the boundaries on how long you will spend doing something. Because however long you give, will be how long it takes. Also remember that the small wins, and the big wins, often take the same amount of time. So go big.

The interesting thing about people is they tend to be short sighted. Eat that cookie, it tastes good. I need to deal with whatever urgent situation I have now, forget about tomorrow. But on the flip side, they are optimistic about what they can do in those same short periods of time. I can become a master of this thing in no time. I can do that, it looks easy.

So what I’ve found as Bill Gates said is people tend to overestimate what they can do in a year, and underestimate what they can do in a decade. They don’t understand that change, done right, is cumulative. It builds on itself and generates momentum. It grows slowly at first, but then, like a flywheel that starts to turn, it’s hard to get going. But once it gets going, it’s hard to stop.

One of my other favorite perspectives on time is there are only 3 days: yesterday, today, and someday. Yesterday is history. So you must ask yourself: what did you learn yesterday that you can bring to today. If you focus on today, and doing the things that matter, then someday will take care of itself.

There is one question I would ask of you: If you’re trying to live your life to the fullest, and your goal is to reach your potential, is what are you doing right now to help bring the future you want to life? You have to make the future happen. We have to do it with you, and together tomorrow is full of promise.

Because if not us, who? If not now, when?