One of the few concepts I’ll always carry with me is: The illusion of I can’t do more.
Since 2022, I have been auto-tracking what my time is being spent on. Locations, computer activity, phone activity, etc. It’s been happening in the background, and I only care to check or look at the data from time to time.
But when I do check, more and more it’s becoming clear to me that my 24 hours can always pack more. Although throughout the days, it might seem otherwise, but by way of using the data as a single source of truth, I lately came to think that 24 hours per day is probably enough. Probably even more than what I need to get things done.
168 hours per week seem too little when there’s not a system in place. A system is one of the hardest things anyone can do. Not to set, but to follow. And a system is not a routine; a system is rather: your physical environment + your daily habits + people you deal with + your mental model of your world at a specific time.
Think of your life like lego. Your life is just a collection of days. Each day has blocks, these are the lego pieces; if you took the initiative to pay extreme attention to re-order the pieces, you’d most likely come across lots of non-needed pieces for the construct you’re trying to build. These pieces are the wasted blocks of time; not rest, not recovery, not sleep, not downtime, not leisure time, but wasted time.
Wasted time is the time that feels stolen from you rather than time you consciously allocate for yourself. I do think that the pitfall here is not avoiding downtime, but rather not being aware of it. Time clutter is a disastrous thing, it’s rather often a make-or-break for your dreams. A dream is often just a collection of tasks done day after day until the objective has been redeemed. And, in that context, time stolen is a direct enemy of redeeming what you think you should get.
Sometimes, this is so non-intuitive, like it’s hard to believe that “Yes, those 3 hours you waste every day are the very reason it probably would be impossible to achieve that certain outcome.”
When you put it that way, it flips everything. And when you start to really pay attention to time, it becomes clear that 168 hours per week is probably a blessing that our modern lifestyles have completely ruined.