I have occasionally… lived a whole life between my first alarm at 5am and my second alarm, five minutes later.

Oliver Sacks

You really don’t own anything. It all disappears. When you die there’s nothing left. The only thing you own, is time.

Robert Greene

A 40 hour time-blocked work week, I estimate, produces the same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.

Cal Newport

Life is filled with constant change, and no certainty, aside from death, at some point in the future. But that’s a tough truth to swallow, and it’s no surprise we find ourselves hanging on dearly to our health, wealth and happiness, no matter how fleeting they are. When Barbie is reminded that life in the real world is “all change” she responds as we all do, with fear: “That’s terrifying. I don’t want that.”

But there’s one thing we do get to keep for ourselves. It’s invisible, slippery, and never moves the way we want it, but we all get it for free. And you’ll always have it, until you die, which you can’t say about your hair, your wit or your best friend. Time.

Time is a strange thing. When we are stressed, it rushes past us at dizzying speeds. When we are bored it oozes like glue. When we are unhappy, unmotivated or depressed, author Robert Greene describes our experience of time as ‘dead’.¹ Worst of all, when we see visual representations of our lifetimes, it never feels like enough.

It can be easier to ignore the clock and kill the time we have to spare, but to use your time properly, you’ll need to look at it directly. Once you admit to yourself that you do in fact have a bit of time up your sleeve, the next question is a tricky one. What should you do with it?

The people with only a sliver of time left usually urge us to recognize our own self-worth and live life on our own terms.² Good advice, but hard to put into practice. These aspirations feel honorable, but like time itself, abstract and hard to pin down.

The following activity aims to do the opposite. It makes us objectify time, making it feel more real, practical and easier to make use of. It does so by getting time out of your head and onto paper. Here’s how it works.

• Take out a blank 3 by 5 inch index card. This card represents a day. If you’d like, write down the day of the week at the top.
• Look at it. That’s a days worth of time. 12 hours or so while you are awake. You’re going to plan it, so that you don’t waste it.
• Write down all the hours in the day, in hour increments (eg. 9am – 10am, 10am-11am.
• Next to each hour-block, write down what you need or want to do. Sum up how you are using that hour, like “lunch with Ben” or “take kids to school”.
• If you’d like, you can also write down the most important things you need to do that day, on the right-hand side of the card.
• That’s it. 

Writing this down can feel boring or pointless. Your day might look dull and uninteresting and you might prefer to wing it. Writing down how you plan to spend your hours also won’t tell you what you should do, which is something most of us wonder. But there’s no need to take it too seriously, or even do it more than once. The only value in this activity is the acknowledgement that you have a certain number of hours in the day and you intend to think about how you should use them.

When I have taken a few minutes to plan out my day I’ve noticed some of the following things:

• My baseline sense of time is way, way off. To realize this, all it takes is writing down all the things I’d like to get done in a day. I can’t find the time for them. It’s like I think I have an extra 4-5 hours up my sleeve.
• How we intend to use our time is really weak. That’s how we get distracted. Writing might help make you a little more accountable.
• Learning that you only have an hour free might sound depressing, but starts an important conversation about priorities. What are you doing that’s less important? What can you drop?
• Writing down some hours on a piece of paper makes time less scary. There’s no hourglasses and skeletons in capes. An hour is an hour, and that’s the way it should be.
• Paradoxically, you realize there’s both more and less hours than you think in a day.
• In order to get something done, it needs to be given time. “Show me someone’s calendar and their spending, and I’ll show you their priorities.” – Ramit Sethi
• When you do something matters.³ Of course, there’s no need to overly optimize this, but maybe you shouldn’t be eating a massive dinner at 11.30pm just before bed.

Time can feel oppressive when we ignore it or try to force it to do things it can’t, like speed up, slow down or go into reverse. Getting time out of our heads and onto paper can help us use it for some purpose⁴, own it and make things happen.

1. Alive Time vs Dead Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYW7oOTi5W0 ↩︎
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3377309/#:~:text=1)%20“I%20wish%20I%27,v). ↩︎
3. Power of When, Michael Breus PhD ↩︎
4. https://ryanholiday.net/will-you-choose-alive-time-or-dead-time/ ↩︎