Time is not on your side

Getting clear on what’s important and letting things go.

The promise of technology was that it would make our lives easier and we’d work less. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keyes wrote a short essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”, predicting 15-hour work weeks by the end of the century.

Queue Arrested Development voice over: it was not a 15-hour week.

But why not?

Do the hustle!

One potential reason is largely cultural, especially in tech. There is seemingly no end to mantras about hustle and the vast ocean of productivity and time management advice. Strangely, one of the more popular forms of content are breakdowns on how highly-successful people structure their mornings.

The promise of productivity has largely morphed from leisure to capacity. How much more can you squeeze out of the day?

The media fetishizes Elon Musk working 80 to 100 hour weeks with the glittering carrot on a stick that if you also work that much, you just might be as successful.

For many the answer to the existential question, “Why do I exist?” is a resounding, “To produce.”

Time has no master

The natural outcome of this philosophical approach to life is an always-on battle to master time. If you just find the right system, if you just have the right mindset, you can do it all.

Experientially, this is not true. I hear it all the time from friends, family, co-workers, the dread of knowing there is so much to do but not enough time to do it. Yet, strangely, the answer is rarely to shed less important things to free up time. Invariably, it’s almost always the opposite...trying to bend time to our to-do list.

But time has no master, and though it may feel like it sometimes, it can’t be controlled.

The negative consequences of our futile attempt to master time

Elon Musk, whose 80-100 hour weeks I mentioned earlier, sleeps six and half hours a night (though that’s probably an overestimate as it doesn’t account for waking hours during sleep), skips breakfast most days, wolfs lunch down while working (if he eats at all), and overeats at dinner time to make up his hunger gap. He struggles with his weight and doesn’t work out enough. This is not an edge case. Millions upon millions of people live this way.

But beyond the physical health implications of Musk’s schedule, he also, frankly, treats people like crap.

Musk developed an atmosphere of fear at Tesla — an environment where the billionaire had a reputation for exploding at top executives and employees on the assembly line alike...

Mark Goldberg, a Morgan Stanley banker that helped take Tesla public in 2010, told Higgins that Musk repeatedly threatened to fire bankers from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs before Tesla's IPO launch in 2010.

"I don't have time for this," Elon Musk reportedly yelled during an episode. "I've got to launch the f------ rocket!"

While this way of living might result in getting a lot done, it also betrays a world-view that is quite hollow once you punch through the veneer: life is about producing and people are the means to that end at best, or at worst, are in the way.

In his book, “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals”, Oliver Burkeman nails this when he writes:

...when you’re trying to Master Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that’s foisted upon you against your will, with no regard for the schedule you’ve painstakingly drawn up in your overpriced notebook.

That unexpected Slack request from a co-worker in need? So maddening. The person on your team that needs a little more of your time than expected to talk something through? OMG. Your kid or partner asking you a question during the work day? Can’t you see I’m working!?

Point in case, as I write this, my wife texted asking me to put a new jug of water on the cooler. My immediate reaction? Annoyance.

The efficiency trap

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of it all is that very few of us become the Musk’s of the world (maybe a handful in a generation). As Burkeman writes, “In other words, you almost certainly won’t put a dent in the universe.”

Rather than create rockets and electric cars with our endless hustle, we constantly find ourselves falling into what Burkeman calls the efficiency trap. The tyranny of the urgent fills our days. We strive for inbox zero, only to have our inbox fill up the next day. We relentlessly tick off to-dos only to have the list grow longer than it was before.

English humorist and historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” This is now known as Parkinson’s law.

Using this as a launch pad, Burkeman writes, “...It’s not simply that you never get through your email; it’s that the process of ‘getting through your email’ actually generates more email.”

Why is that?

“The more efficient you get, the more you become ‘a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations,’ in the words of the management expert Jim Benson.”

The result is that the important things keep getting pushed off while we take one more GSD dopamine hit.

Opening up to time and determining your priorities

So what’s the answer?

I’ll spare you more Burkeman quotes, but the gist of his argument is that on average we only have 4,000 weeks of life—an existence smaller than even a grain of sand in the ocean of time. Thus by definition, most of the things we could do in life, we won’t.

On the surface this could seem depressing. But once embraced it becomes incredibly freeing. It means that what we choose to spend our time on becomes one of the most meaningful decisions we can make.

We don’t make time or master it, but we can open ourselves up to it. We can embrace it’s limits and in the process find more meaning in what we choose to do vs. what we could do or could’ve done.

This requires the hard work of determining priorities. It’s actually much easier to let the demands of the day dictate where we put our time and energy. But to slow down and define priorities—and stick to them—is difficult and sometimes even painful.

What prioritization isn’t

One caveat: priorities are not hammers looking for nails. You can’t use them as a blunt force object to push any and all work requests away. There’s a fine balance. On one hand, we need to stick to our plans. On the other, we need to be open to a real need in real time—and have the courage to have proper trade-off conversations.

It also doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have time for the day-to-day ebb and flow of demands. Time is a network good, which simply means “its value depends on one's ability to share it with other people in coordinated social and economic activities.”

Proper prioritization allows for unplanned work. If you feel like you can’t slow down to help a teammate, or if interruptions send you into a frustration frenzy, it means one of two things: either you did a poor job by loading up too many priorities (fix it) or you probably have some things that you can stop doing or de-prioritize.

I’ll leave it with this. You can’t get it all done. But you can get some important things done. And what those are, and how you show up doing them, is entirely up to you.

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