Our limited time

“Memento mori” (“remember that you have to die”).
There are 2 ways to react:

• it’s obvious, what’s the news?
• oh sh*t, I keep reading it and forgetting the minute after.

That our life is limited in sense of time. If you believe in eternal life or metempsychosis or you see everything as a big continuum in a fully entangled quantum-based system: I’m talking about this particular instance of your existence, before your soul will migrate to another body or before your molecules will re-combine in another form.
Death is a recurrent theme in religion and in philosophy, with sometime great focus on time, for example: it is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much; the life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have wastefully (Seneca wrote in “De brevitate vitae“, that you can translate into “On the Shortness of Life”).
Death is also debated in scientific research, since it’s not 100% clear why we age and why we die (I mean: searching into a deep level, not just stopping, as usual, after the first answer, you know I don’t like to stay on the surface, I want to go deeper. Since, very differently from money, we can’t gain more time (we’re not characters in the Sci-Fi movie “In Time“), the only wise way to manage it is basically don’t waste it and know how to properly allocate it in our activities, to achieve better results (whatever it does mean for us) and to live better according to our values. I’m not here to yell “YOLO!” and start compiling your lifetime wish list like in Bucket List, but at the same time it can help reading the “Top five regrets of the dying” recorded by a palliative cure nurse, so you find that it’s insane spending too much time working, even dying in the office – the Karoshi phenomenon (death by overwork) is not confined in Japan, it takes place in other place as well, as you can read on the suspicious death of this 33-year old in Sydney).

Deaths due to long working hours per 100K people, estimated in 2016. Source WHO and International Labour Organization.
I’m not going so extreme, but the point is that we often fail to estimate how much time we have, so let’s have a quick look.

How much time we have

Since I’m a data visualization lover, I’ll try to represent here the time consumed and estimated remaining time to live (according to “actuarial tables“). Let’s say you’re a person living in US, if you combines (for the statisticians out there: don’t kill me) male and female life expectancies (human females live on average a few years more than males) for a 40 years old adult, it’s expected (I’m talking of expected value, not saying that someone is pretending this from you) that you will still have roughly 39.2 years. In other words, you passed the halfway point, crossed the line that cut in half the sum of time you already lived and the one that is expected to live. And, as you may imagine, living 10 years during your 20s-30s is quite different from living the same amount of time during your 60s-70s (not saying better/worse, just different, even if all the world around remains the same). And think now that your beloved ones will not stay there forever. That the only ones that will remember the long hours spent at work will be not your colleagues or managers, but rather your sons, your spouse and all the people you’re not spending time with.
Graphically, if each square box is a week (approximatively 52weeks, it’s the concept that matter, please forgive me if I round some number, 52×7=364 instead of the 365.25 days for the whole year, but we can deal with an error less than 0.35%), this is your situation:

Actually, I used the “correct” number of weeks, so not rounded 52 weeks x 79.2 = 4118, but (365.25/7) x 79.2 = circa 4133, that’s almost 15 weeks more (more than 100 days of life extra, reminding words quoted to Woody Allen: “I quit smoking, I will live one more week, and that week is pouring rain”). This was, I guess, what lead Oliver Burkeman to write “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals“. Maybe I’ll write, as usual, some recap and considerations also on this book that I read a few months ago.

The importance of measuring time

Rule #1: you cannot manage what you don’t know. It applies to your money, to your weight, to specific tasks if you are working on a project, to people if you manage some of them (especially true if you are a young parent). Log, log everything: don’t spend time on searching the perfect schema or procedure to register your time (it’s OK to have a quick look searching for inspiration, but really don’t waste too much time in seeing instead of doing!). There’s plenty of apps, programs, websites and fancy spreadsheets, but I strongly recommend to start by the classical way: the old-fashioned pencil on paper (I was actually ordered to do that when i was a very young trainee officer in a military academy). In this phase, you don’t have to think anything, just write down. Every activity counts. I already wrote it in Tracciamento del tempo e pianificazione – con tutorial e foglio di calcolo gratuito
Here’s an example:
06:00 Wake up
06:10 Physical exercise + podcast
06:40 Physiological activities (WC)
06:45 Shower
07:00 Meditation
07:15 Breakfast
07:20 Dressing up
07:30 Reading
…

It’s OK to do a little bit of multitasking, but unless you’re one of the (really very) few humans born capable to do it (see: article on multitasking), the effective combinations aren’t that much. Examples: podcast/audiobook when driving or reading a book while you are commuting on public transportation. We’re not built for complex multitasking.

The purpose of tracking time is similar to diet diary and personal financial logs – not only to identify, but also as a “deterrent”: as a side effect, you’ll think twice before eating a second cake or spend in useless stuff, if you also have to report it (so you’ll feel twice guilty, if you spend 2 hours scrolling on TikTok and then writing and reading that you wasted time in this way). Remember to be kind with yourself: once you recognize you’re wasting time (“waste” is subjective to your own values and priority in life), you’ll be more aware next time you’ll stay glued to your mobile screen.

As also suggested in “Designing your life”, the step further in logging is asking yourself, for example at the end of the day “Does it make me happy? So let’s analyze and change.”

Once you know how much time you need and how you usually spend your time, it’s time (no pun intended) to move on to the next phase: planning. You can then plan how to spend your remaining weeks.

In other words: are you in a certain point in life, e.g.: on a lazy monday night watching hours of pointless videos on YT asking yourself “what am I doing with my life?”? Realizing that you’re not deeply satisfied and it seems you aren’t doing that much, but even worse, with a proper direction? (not necessarily a clear point, but even a far suggestion).
To quote Seneca again, but this time from “Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius)”:
“errant consilia nostra, quia non habent quo derigantur; ignoranti quem portum petat nullus suus ventus est” (“Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind”).

If you don’t think yourself as a homo faber, if you don’t choose in which direction set your time (and attention and other resources as well), someone else will choose for you (you can go deeper reading Dopamine Nation).

If you are searching for an inspiration at a very high level, I’d suggest you to read my post on Designing Your Life: Build a Life that Works for You (with interactive mind map!).

Examples of spending time

“Ars longa, vita brevis” (the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, on the long time to acquire and perfect one’s expertise and our short time in which to do it).

When I was a young guitarist, I encountered a lot of elders that admired me, the “first of the class” that had also time to enjoy music. When I asked them what was stopping them from starting to play a musical instrument right now, they replied that it was late (for what? for becoming the new Hendrix?) or that they have “a lot to do” (these answers received also by the average lazy retired man without any kind of hobbies or activities).
So I started to imagine their lives, just as an exercise to imagine also the “future me”. Then I also read a few books, including the ones remarking what you can do even with the first 20 hours (see the TED talk below) and the ones telling that you need 10K hours to become a master in your field. Obviously, 10,000 hours of deliberate learning and intense exercise/practice.

This is an example of 20K hours spent on improving on bass:

Do you think it’s a lot of time? Yes, it is, indeed, but think now of the time spent on social media, ugly series, junk news and a lot of stuff you follow passively without learning or even leaving you absolutely nothing in your mind; you can make a better use of your time and your brain, really. I mean: if you want to relax, do it, if you want to be involved in fun activities, OK, but please don’t switch off your mind like a zombie.

Coming back to the 20hours or 10,000 hours when you spend time in something (but again: not just performing the same task, mindlessly, but in deliberate and intentional focused learning), this is a qualitative (despite the fact I also put there the equation and the numbers) graph to represent the asymptotic function of the proficiency level we can reach, given a certain amount of time spent. On X axis, the hours (0 to 200h in this window) and then on Y axis the proficiency level that is function of the hours spent, from 0 to 100 (that is the maximum expert in the world), where 60/100 (the thick dashed line) is the “sufficient/entry level” for a beginner/amateur:

Again: this is qualitative, not an absolute standard valid to every activity: I won’t trust a chef with only 20h experience, serving me a Fugu pufferfish (since 1958, fugu chefs must earn a license to prepare and sell fugu to the public. This involves a two- or three-year apprenticeship. The licensing examination process consists of a written test, a fish-identification test, and a practical test, preparing and eating the fish. Only about 35% of the applicants pass – oh, I forgot to tell: the fish contains a lethal dose of Tetrodotoxin, so you must be an expert to deal with it, unless you want to kill someone, that’s why this dish is forbidden at the emperor court). Similarly, for some professions (firemen, policemen, medical doctors, engineers in big constructions, military personnel in war zones and so on) experience really counts in saving lives, so absolutely 20h won’t be a significant threshold. I’m talking about entry level activities to perform basic tasks (surgeon removing a couple of stitches in a convenient area, engineer designing a small wall, fireman extinguishing a small isolated fire start, soldier checking that his senior colleagues don’t need logistical support) or hobbies you want to enjoy (playing 4 chords on your guitar, not performing a live G3 concert with Joe Satriani).

So, let’s say you want to learn to play an easy song on your electric bass, you’ll probably need 20 hours (in deep work mode and knowing what to see and do, but this is another story) to do it in a decent manner. Then, as you see in the graph, the function tells that you will need a massive amount of hours, hundreds, to learn to play better, until you reach a point where an imperceptible epsilon of quality requires countless hours of practice. The point here is: are you planning to play your instrument like the top 1% or you just want to enjoy playing music during your free time alone or with friends? The difference here is really important, since some passions (someone could call them “obsessions”) are really time-consuming – and since we know our time is limited, we have to evaluate cost-opportunity of our activities, since a lot of them are mutually exclusive (e.g.: I tried studying while practicing some chords figures on guitar, but it’s not the optimal solution, specially if you want to produce notes while studying).
If you are comfortable with a “sufficient proficiency”, enough to enjoy the activity, you’ll then use the other hours to start/maintain another interest. Of course, there are some hobbies or activities that share same common ground (e.g.: once you learn to play an instrument, the second one will be easier compared to starting to study from scratch, since you are already familiar with music – same is for physical activities or in studying similar subjects).
In a society that strongly encourage hyper-specialization, you may want instead to cultivate your multi-potentiality (be aware: it doesn’t mean to start reading a book and then quit to jump to another book for a few pages and so on, this is not being multi-potential). You may want to experiment with different activities, in different levels:

Note here that I didn’t randomly choose the logarithmic scale in representing the number of hours spent in a certain activity: for the reason explained above (do you remember the graph is not linear bur rather going slowly toward the asymptote?), to gain a small advantage (in comparison with your “competitors”), you probably need to spend hundreds of hours. While the person A invested 10K hours in one activity to become the master, then 2K hours in a second one to be good at it, the person B decided to be very good (even if not “the master”) in the first activity, quite good in the second one, then had time to experiment and follow/enjoy other activities.
No one model is better than the other one, it’s up to you: you can decide when and how allocate your time (in this case, I managed a sum of 12K hours in total, which is slightly more than 4 years if you dedicate on average 8h per day (weekend included) in some activities.

The same kind of “activities exclusion” (once you choose a few specific ones) applies to everything, from going out with friends to study for a 2nd university degree, to train for the next marathon and so on. Keep that in mind, again, when you’re watching a movie that you don’t even enjoy, but you are just tired and annoyed in that very moment. And talking about movie: every time you watch one, you’ll cutting on possible movies you’ll watch before die. I have a huge list of books I want to read before leaving this life and I know that reading a bad one (“bad” according to me, of course) will steal the time to another book I won’t never read.

A lot of people are obsessed with accumulating and saving money, but it seems that for the majority of people time is something you can waste since it’s “free”.
I really thank people every time someone interacts with me (friends, relatives, everyone worked even a few minutes with me – not to mention all the workers or people in general I ask for information – can confirm).
So I thank you for the time you spent reading these words.
Have a good life and enjoy your time with joy and intentionality!

“If you want to know the value of one year, just ask a student who failed a course.
If you want to know the value of one month, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.
If you want to know the value of one hour, ask the lovers waiting to meet.
If you want to know the value of one minute, ask the person who just missed the bus.
If you want to know the value of one second, ask the person who just escaped death in a car accident.
And if you want to know the value of one-hundredth of a second, ask the athlete who won a silver medal in the Olympics.”
(Marc Levy)