It’s never too late

I quit drinking in April of 2022, 3 1/2 years ago at the time of this writing. It’s the single decision in my life I’m the most proud of. Even so, I can’t help wish I had made it sooner, which is the irony of every good decision we make. We’re happy, but we also wonder would might have been if we had left that job sooner, asked her to marry us sooner, taken that big swing sooner. The worst part is that this circular thinking can be paralyzing. We get stuck thinking it’s too late now, so I might as well keep doing what I’m doing. Don’t let your primitive monkey brain fool you - it’s never too late. But you need to move, now.

What sobriety taught me about using time

I’ve been open about my journey with sobriety. I can count on one hand how many weekends I took off drinking from the time I started at 17 to the time I quit at 52. 35 years of weekends - I haven’t done the math, maybe I don’t want to see the number. It’s big. And while I’m proud of myself and grateful I had the courage to do it, I’m left wondering what I could have accomplished with all those days lost to thinking about drinking, drinking and recovering from drinking. It’s depressing when I think of how much more productive I am now and what I could have done. But I’ve learned to find comfort in the fact that I quit when I did and I didn’t lose any more days than I already lost. That’s got to be good enough, because I can’t do anything about the past. And that’s a lesson I’m learning to apply to other decisions I’ve been putting off.

Stop trying to make time

It’s funny how we think about time. The #1 reason most people cite when talking about things they’ve always wanted to do but can’t right now, is time. I don’t have time. I’ll do it in January when I have more time. I just need to get through the next couple of months and things will settle down. Then I’ll have the time. Spoiler alert: you’ll never have time. Time doesn’t magically appear, and if you don’t have the time now, there is no reason to believe you’ll have it later. The phrase “make the time” also doesn’t help because nobody can make time. Time just happens. It’s the one thing we can never slow down, stop or speed up. What we can control is how we spend it, right now. Because it’s the only time we know for sure we have.

Lessons from Tim

The best resource I’ve found to help me make the best use of my time is Tim Ferris’ best-selling book, “The Four Hour Workweek”. It’s a masterpiece and I can’t do all the lessons and tools justice, you just have to read it. But here are some things that have stuck with me, and that I’ve actually managed to put into practice.

Build Walls Around Your Time

Tim talks a lot about Parkinson’s Law in the context of time. It basically says that our work will take up as much time as we give it. An hour meeting will take an hour, even if we can achieve our goals in 20 mins. If we allow people full access to our calendars, it will be full of meetings. If we want more control over our time, we need to limit the amount of time we give to certain things. No meetings on Mondays or Fridays, and no meetings after 4pm. Magically you’ll have fewer meetings, more freedom and somehow the work will still get done.

Procrastinate Smartly

Procrastination is not a bad word. I learned this lesson in school. If an assignment is due on Friday at 4pm, I’d watch people work their asses off and spend 100 hours on it over the two weeks leading up to the deadline. I’d leave it until the day before, and spend 6 hours on it. Yes, they got a better mark, but not that much better. So they spent 15 times longer to get a 10% higher mark. I’ll take that tradeoff any day. In corporate environments, time kills. The longer you plan something to take, the more people will change their minds or other things will come up to compete with the resources you need. If you give someone 2 weeks to do something, they’ll leave it to an hour before the meeting. So give them until tomorrow. Shorten timelines, confine the work into smaller pieces. And don’t do anything until you need to do it.

No email before 11:00 am

If you have more than one critical thing to do each day, you’re trying to do too much. Ask yourself, if I did just one thing today to make me feel great about my day, what would it be? Then block two hours in your calendar to get it done, with no interruptions. Do not even open email or any other apps until it’s done. At 11:00, open email and deal with everything else that’s been thrown at you. By then, you’ve already done the only thing that matters.

We’re never going to stop obsessing over time. It only gets worse as we get older and realize how little of it we have left. I can’t do anything about the time I’ve lost to bad decisions, or decisions I took too long to make. I can accept that. What I can’t accept is the thought of looking back in ten years and realizing I had the chance to change and didn’t - that I thought it was too late, when I really had all the time I needed. We need to find the courage to let time use us more wisely. Today.