ITYSKA #5: Your Time is Limited
The Older You Get, The More You Realize Just How Limited Your Time is
In 2005, Steve Jobs, CEO, business owner, investor, and multiple other titles and achievements that could take up this entire paragraph, gave a commencement speech to a large group of graduating students at Stanford. The entire commencement speech is worth watching; he talks about dropping out of college, going back to college, learning calligraphy, using what he learned to build a computer with beautiful typography, and so much more. There is plenty of life experience and nuggets of wisdom in just 15 minutes. There is, however, one moment that struck me the most. Before that moment, he talks about death, living every day knowing that he will die, an accidental prophecy given his death by respiratory arrest over a decade ago. After he discusses living with his pancreatic tumor, talking about how he got better (as far as we know anyway), and then he says this:
“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
We’ve all had that part in our lives where we realize just how limited our time is. We all have this sudden realization that we can’t play every video game out there, watch every TV and movie on streaming, or read every book known to man. There’s only so much we can experience in life before we bite the dust. In order to say yes to one opportunity, we have to say no to a hundred others out there. We all have a choice in life, a freedom to choose. The fact you’ve chosen to read this right now is a choice you’ve actually made. Not only are you taking brain space to read this, but you’re also taking up precious amounts of your time as well.
When you think about it, time is the only true resource that matters in life. Once you use it up, you can never have it back. If you lose your money, you can always get that money back. If you forget what you’ve learned, you can always relearn. If you lose your friends, you can always make new ones. If you lose your memories, you can always make new ones. You can’t do any of those things with time. To put this into perspective, the average life expectancy worldwide is 71, or 3,692 weeks. If that sounds short to you, that’s because it is. If you want a more sobering picture check out Wait But Why’s Your Life in Weeks or Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.
And that circles back to one question: what are you doing with your life? How are you actually spending your time? What value are you providing to the world? Pay close attention to what activities take up most of your time. Then ask yourself if it’s giving you any value in your life. We only have one life in this world. There’s only so much time we can spend on it, so you have to make it count.
📱App I’ve Been Using: If you have problems managing your time online, there are plenty of tools and apps out there to help you keep track of where you spend your time online and for how long. An app I’ve been using is StayFree. The purpose is to keep track of how much time you spend on your smartphone and gives you tools to restrict the usage of certain apps. You can also set usage limits for your apps and you get alerts when you exceed those usage limits. It’s been beneficial to me when it comes to my work and it lets me know if I spend too much time on apps like Youtube or just looking up stuff on Google. If you want to give this app a try, you can learn more here.
📝Most Interesting Articles I’ve Come Across: Continuing the theme of time management, there are good articles out there that have helped me when it comes to figuring out what is worth reading, what can be considered high-quality information, and how to manage not just your time, but also your mind better. Because as I’ve realized over the years, if you don’t know how to manage your time and mind, somebody else will. Blogger and author Mark Manson’s widely shared article called the Attention Diet has been incredibly helpful not just with what I do in this newsletter but with how I manage my life. The three steps of this diet are simple: 1. Correctly identify nutritious information and relationships, 2. Cut out all the junk and 3. Cultivating habits that deepen our focus and attention. If all of that sounds helpful, please give it a read.
If you want a more specific time management technique, there’s also Time Boxing. This technique is all about boxing your schedule into two buckets: reactive work, which is work that involves reacting to the needs of others via calls, texts, emails, etc, and reflective work, work that can only be done without distractions such as planning writing, reading, etc. You can read more Time Boxing via this article by Nir Eyal. He is the best person to read about when it comes to the topic of distractions and how to resist the urge to be distracted. His book Indistractable is considered a modern-day classic when it comes to this subject and his blog Nir and Far is also worth checking out as well.
Both my previous newsletter (please read my previous one if you haven’t done so, I worked so hard on that one!) and the current one have a lot of focus on building habits. There’s a lot of scientific literature and focus on habits, but what about the philosophical case for habits. What do ancient and modern philosophers have to say about habits? In Praise of Habits - So Much More Than Mindless Reflexes on the website Psyche helps explain how habits help sustain intelligent behavior rather than hinder it.
📹 Videos Worth Watching: The other person that has the best expertise when it comes to time management and productivity, is Cal Newport. He is a Georgetown University professor for Computer Science who has a total of seven books, including must-read books such as So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and A World Without Email. But the most interesting thing about him is (*gasp*) he has never had a social media account. Incredibly shocking stuff, right?! Anyway, he has a podcast called Deep Questions that he’s been running for two years now, and the podcast now comes in a video form. The cool thing is that he has playlists dedicated to him either answering questions from the audience or him explaining concepts he’s written about for years now. Check out his video discussing Deep Work, as that’s central to a lot of his work. After that, check out the rest of Newport’s work, either through Youtube, his podcast, books, or his blog Study Hacks.
If you are more adventurous and want more of a deep dive, not just in time management, but also in focus, resilience, self-discipline, and much more, there is the Youtube channel The Art of Improvement. The channel has 770K subscribers and was even promoted by Sir Richard Branson himself. He has plenty of videos out there, so you can sample some of his videos or you can immerse yourself into his full self-improvement course which stitches together some of his videos into a one hour and a half mega-video. If you want to hunker down and truly want to go the distance, give it a watch.
The last video I will recommend is one tangentially related to our theme of time. Namely, the one thing that takes up a lot of time in our lives: work. How much of your life is dominated by work? More importantly, is the work you’re doing giving you, others, and the world value? There are a lot of questions when it comes to work. Indeed, I ask myself a lot of questions when it comes to picking what kind of work I want to do. If you have an uneasy relationship with work, maybe it’s time to reconsider and break up with your current job, and start anew. If you’ve been having these type of thoughts, this video by author and speaker Samantha Clarke titled Are You Ready To Break Up With Work can help. She is a happiness consultant, a TedX speaker, and author of the provocatively titled Love It or Leave It: How To Be Happy At Work. If you want to work and live with meaning, purpose, and intention, this video is for you.
🎤Podcast Series I’ve Been Listening To: Not a specific episode, but an entire series of podcasts I’ve been listening to is Free Time by Jenny Blake. She is an author of the books, Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One, and more recently, Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business. This is a podcast more on the shorter, usually hovering around 40 minutes or even less than that. It’s perfect for me to listen to during my morning routine, especially when I’m busy. It’s a great podcast if you’re just starting off with a small business, and I enjoy the warm, friendly tone of the show. Check out both the book and the podcast on the Free Time podcast if you’re a creative business owner.
⛓️Stronger Than Steel, Light as Plastic? : Using a polymerization process and through the power of science, MIT chemical engineers created a new material that is stronger than steel and lighter than plastic that could be produced in large quantities. The invention of this material has potentially massive implications on how certain things can be built and can its uses can range from inventing new forms of transportation and phones, to building the support structures of buildings such as houses. If you want to read more on how this material was created and all the science behind it, by all means, read it.
That’s it for this newsletter. I’ll be experimenting a bit more on my upload frequency. Biweekly or monthly works the best for me given my scheduling. Please share this newsletter with others and subscribe to me if you find my content valuable. If you have any feedback for me, I am more than willing to listen. Finally, I now have a Twitter account and you can follow me there if you want updates on when you can expect the next edition ITYSKA. Thank you for reading, and as always, stay interesting!