Hi friends,

“Where did the time go today?” This is something that I used to find myself saying constantly. There are still days that I look at the clock and wonder how the day slipped away, but they are much less frequent.

The ancient philosopher Seneca said, “We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.”

The best antidote to time-wasting that I’ve found is something called time blocking, which I learned about in Cal Newport’s book Deep Work.

Time blocking is an easy technique that involves placing activities and tasks into your calendar daily. The first step is to figure out the most important things/activities that you will be doing on a given day. Then, put them on your calendar. The method does not matter, I use Google Calendar because it is easy to move things around when my schedule gets disrupted. 

One thing that I’ve realized since keeping track of my time is just how bad I was at estimating the total time something would take. Typically, I would underestimate how long a given task would take. Now I understand better how much time I need to allocate to different activities and projects.

Time blocking is not restricted to maximizing productivity, in fact, it should be used to spend your time consciously each day. Just like we should manage our money and track where it goes, we should spend equal time looking at where we allocate our time. Because how we spend our time is ultimately how we spend our lives.

I’ve found that there are two different ways to spend time: actively and passively. Spending your time passively means to be jerked around by external forces and circumstances that constitute your day. In this case, life is happening to you and you are in a reactionary state.

Spending time actively means strategically mapping out how you want to spend it. This could be seen on a micro scale by planning the things you’d like to accomplish in a given day. And even more importantly, planning bigger events on the macro scale like vacations and trips.

If you want to have time to do nothing in your day and watch Netflix, you can schedule that into the calendar. Oftentimes, when I schedule time into my calendar to be unproductive, I’m able to enjoy it and not feel like I should be doing something else. 

It just comes down to being more intentional with time. It is our most precious unrenewable resource and we should treat it with respect.

Until next week,

Kevin