In a year and a half, I will be as old as my mom was when she started raising me. This feels insane. I struggle to do little things myself that I can hardly imagine taking care of someone. Time does fly. The limitation of time suddenly hit me. After all, who knows how many years I have left until I start raising kids. I went through how much time I spent on things to have a better understanding of what my time is flying through. It was shocking how much time I spent on things that seemed not worth the time. It shocked me a second time when I saw how little time I spent on things that I see as priorities. There is a life I want to build and I should be spending my time to keep moving in that direction. Yet the footprints of my time told otherwise.

This unwise usage of time is shaped by how I decide to spend time. I planned my time by dividing time and assigning tasks to hours: something along the lines of ‘I am going to spend 3 hours studying for the exam, go work out for an hour, and go out for dinner for the rest of the evening.’ This miserably fails. We are terrible at predicting how many hours something will take. This is not our fault per se but rather the large number of variables that are in this ‘how long does it take to do something’ equation. Maybe there was bad traffic. Maybe there was an unexpected bug in the code. These jeopardize my time at the worst moments. The time division system is easy to break or be broken. It leads to vicious cycles of procrastination and miserable tries to save time in weird ways such as microwaving a frozen pizza 2 minutes instead of the stated 3 minute instruction on the package. Before we look at the better way to manage time we need to go over why managing time should be approached differently from managing other resources.

One peculiarity about time is that you cannot save it. With most things in our life from avocados to dollar bills, they can be put in the fridge or in a vault and you can use it later. With time you cannot do this. You cannot shove 3 hours of Monday in your fridge and use it on your Friday night. How great would that be? We would have longer weekends. This makes the opportunity cost of time not time itself but all the other options of spending that amount of time. With a hundred dollars, you can buy a new pair of sunglasses, purchase an online programming course, take yourself out on a fancy date, or you can put it in the account and use it later. With 3 hours, you can go shopping for a new pair of sunglasses, watch 3 hours of an online programming course, or go on a fancy date. But you cannot put the 3 hours somewhere for later use. This peculiarity tricks us to think that if we constantly do something, we must be spending time wisely. We acknowledge that we are not working when we are having fun. But there are these fake priorities that seem like decent uses of time but in fact could have been spent much better. Doing errands is an example. We can almost come up with infinite errands and spend hours on them. Surely a busy day doing errands should be time well spent but there were most likely things that are priorities compared to errands. It is almost comfortable to see spending time like filling a cup of water; if it fills, it is good. It should be treated more like filling a puzzle; you have to put each piece at the right place to complete the picture you want.

A better alternative to spend time is making a list of priorities. Going back to the same question of three options: sunglasses, shoes, and a date, having your priorities set up will lead you to the best choice, not just one that will make you spend time on it without second thought. And priorities should be determined yourself. It could take time for you to decide your priorities and they could also change in the long-run, but everyone would be able to come up with some idea of it. If you feel the necessity to see your hours by numbers, you can track and review. Tracking time never hurts because you cannot be wrong about it the way you can be wrong about scheduling them. Reviewing how you spent your time in this manner would also help you form an idea of how you think you are spending your time vs. how you are actually spending your time.

I do not mean that one should spend every single minute of your life on something that is a priority. That would be an unrealistic and unhappy way to live. But time is limited. It is frighteningly easy to let time just flow on things that are not your priorities. In the end, our life is a story of how we lived and how we lived is a stack of how we spent our time. Spend your time on things that matter.