The Art of Time
Background
I’m sitting in a coffee shop right now. It’s raining and cold outside. The sky is shaded dark blue and I can hear rain drops hitting the brick road in front of the store. It’s calming. I thought I’d spend sometime away from work today to write. My previous post has yet to garner much attention, but I’m a strong believer that with patience, time, and persistence anything is possible. Over the course of my life, I’ve found that people tend to lack one of the three and are either very good at two and if not two than one. I myself, at this moment in time, am good at two and working to become better at one. Recognizing this, I have chosen to write about time today.
The Concept of Time
According to Santosh Kesari, MD, PhD, neurologist, neuro-oncologist, neuroscientist and chair of the Department of Translational Neurosciences and Neurotherapeutics at the John Wayne Cancer Institute at Providence Saint John’s Health Center.
“For a 10-year-old, one year is 10 percent of their lives,”
“For a 60-year-old, one year is less than two percent of their lives.”
This is an interesting thought that I’ve heard in the past from a YouTuber named Casey Neistat. Casey moved from New York City (NYC) to California for a change of pace in his life and wished to dedicate most of his time to raising his children. He went from the height of his career in YouTube and founding a new company to leaving the city and never looking back. Raising children was more important to Casey and he came to understand that he needed to make better use of his and his children’s time. He, like many others, chose to use time wisely.
A Life Lesson
I believe Casey’s situation is very common and can be applied to most people’s lives. In the case of my own, I am fortunate enough to have people teach me the concepts and value of time. When I was in college, I interned at my universities IT department. The work I was assigned to do there ultimately didn’t help me in achieving my long-term goals and as such was seen by myself as a waste of my time. In the department I had two managers, one who was a much older gentleman and the other a younger man who was above him in rank. They both had family’s, made a good living, and from what I could see, they both were content.
The older man was my direct manager and he came to the cubical I worked in quite often. He would chat for hours telling me stories of his life and give advice on how I should navigate my own. I’ll admit I didn’t pay much attention to him in those days. I walked around with a chip on my shoulders and thought I knew everything there was to know about the world, but little did I know I would soon become a student and be humbled by his words.
The older gentlemen had many interests, passions, and hobbies. He played baseball, traveled the world, learned different languages, read countless books, and more. As a result, he was always busy doing something and never sat stationary. He never wasted his time. From our conversations and with the minimal listening I did, I could at least gather that he understood how to manage his time fairly well and he knew the value of his time. He was known to be punctual for meetings and everyone in the department could count on him if something went wrong.
One day he made a trip to my cubical to have a chat with me and give some advice on life. There was a table next to my cubicle and that was where he sat. That day he talked about my career and the things I was working on inside and outside of school. He asked me what I was doing in my off-time while I was “on the clock”. I was honest with him. I shrugged my shoulders and gave him a simple response “nothing much”. He shook his head, let out a breath of air, and in that moment he gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received in my life. He said “You’re young, so do as much as you can now to get ahead of yourself”. With just a single sentence he taught me the concept of time.
In The Blink of An Eye
The faster you move, the slower time goes. According to the laws of physics, you will actually age more slowly if you travel extremely fast. Time slows down the faster you go because momentum bends the fabric of spacetime causing time to pass slower. I like to use this very thought to counteract the argument people give me when they say I need to slow down. All things considered, this may not be an exact representation of what the fact applies to, but there’s some truth in it and how I apply it to my life.
My Time
During the week (Mon-Fri), I try to manage my time in the most efficient way I know how. I start work at 9am and get off at 6pm. At exactly exactly 6pm I close my laptop for work and I don’t open it again until the next day. Afterwards, I walk about 40mins from my home to a coffee shop across town and work there on my other laptop from 7pm-10:30pm. During this time, I work on my startups and passion projects. After I’m finished working at the coffee shop, I take another 40mins to walk home and by 12pm, I’m in bed ready to start the next day. With this schedule, I’m able to have more than 2 hours of leisure while getting 8 hours of sleep and having over an hour of exercise.
If we take an even deeper look at how I use and spend my time, we can gather some data. I like to use the words Use and Spend when describing my time because there are two sides to the coin. On one side, I spend time doing things (time spent is time I will never get back). On the other however, I use time. This is time I will get back in the form of compensation.
- Working at my day job I use 9 hours of my day
- Working on projects I use 3 hours and 30 minutes of my day
- I spend 8 hours of my day sleeping
- I spend 1 hour and 20 minutes of my day walking (6.4 miles)
- I spend 2 hours and 10 minutes of my day on leisure activities
Now I’ll explain why my schedule is set this way. The average entrepreneur will spend about 50.5 hours working within a given week. In a given week, I spend 33.5 hours (including two 8 hour days on Saturday and Sunday) just on my startup and passion projects. I spend exactly 45 hours working at my daily job (Mon-Fri) because that is what is required of me to exceed expectations and maintain a steady balance within my career at work. I spend 1 hour and 20 minutes walking each day which is approximately 6.4 miles everyday. That is well above the CDC recommended distance of 5 miles or 10,000 steps daily to keep in good health. I spend 8 hours sleeping which is widely regarded as the standard amount of time everyone should spend sleeping at night. I have 2 hours and 10 minutes of leisure time each day, which according to some statistics is a bit lower than the sweet-spot which is just at 3 and a half hours a day, but I can accept that loss. I’ll admit, I am a bit lacking with respect to leisure, but I think this is a relative number and varies on a case-by-case basis.
Principles of Time
Thinking realistically, I understand that the numbers given above cannot be everyones life schedule. I’m a 26 year old living in a big city with no pressing responsibilities, I have a job that respects my time, and I earn a good living. However, if people are looking to make the most efficient use of their time in a given week and subsequently, their lives, I think they should follow a pattern of their own. In order to do this though, from my experience I’ve seen a similar pattern in others who make great use of their time. I’ve met and surrounded myself with people who work in Finance, Tech, Business, Medicine, Economics, Education, Civil Service, etc. and they all make great use of their time while having these core principles in common.
Principles of Time:
- If they have a job, they make sure it’s one that respects and values their time.
- They stopped investing in money and started investing in time.
- They surround themselves with people who don’t waste time.
- If they’re young, they do as much as they can to get ahead of themselves.
- As they get older, they adjust for time past.
I believe that if people keep these things in mind, they can make great use of their time. While I am young, I have reaped many benefits from following these principles in my life and have seen the effect it has had on me and the people who surround me. Making the best use of time and becoming a master of it can be a powerful tool and having it can benefit others greatly. Time is an art and we are the painters of our own canvas.
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