Hey there,

Welcome back. Phew, what a week.

Here’s what I have for you this week:

• One big thing. Time flies. Could a fresh perspective on time help you better prioritize what you do with the time you have? Let’s find out.

• You have to check this out. Links to resources from the one big thing.

• Tools & Tech. A digital document library with millions of documents.

To start, let me ask you a question…

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

Your life in weeks.

Let me begin by gauging your estimation abilities…

Without doing any mental math—give me your best rapid-fire guess:

How many weeks can the average person expect to live?

If you’re like me, you have a feel for hours in a day, even years in a life. But weeks are curious. Weeks are units of time where lots can happen, where you can get something done.

I’ll give you a moment.

OK. An 80-year-old will have lived just over four thousand weeks. If you make it to 90, you can add about seven hundred bonus weeks.

I’m 52. That means 2,700 weeks down. And one of those I spent in the Florida panhandle. That stings now.

1,300 weeks to go. More if I’m lucky. But not that many more. If you’re on your second bloody mary this morning, that will sober you right up.

In his article Your Life in Weeks, Tim Urban created a graphic depicting what your life looks like plotted out in weeks, and one showing how a typical American spends their weeks. Check it out.

In his article "The Tail End," he unpacks what he calls the "depressing math" involved in calculating the weeks you have left and the startlingly few times you are likely to do some of your favorite things (e.g., see childhood friends, eat pizza).

But like a cold shower, depressing math can snap you to attention. In tandem with life reminders that no one is guaranteed the full allotment of their four thousand weeks, depressing math helped me stop putting off difficult decisions about how I was prioritizing the use of my time today.

To keep this front of mind, I bought a poster showing my life in weeks. It’s in my home office. (Confession: I bought the poster that shows your life going to age 100. I’m an optimist.)

Fighting time

One big problem is that we aren't very good at making the best use of our small supply of time.

It is helpful to know this is not a new problem. Writing in the year 49, in the essay On the Shortness of Life, the philosopher Seneca observed:

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

A natural response to limited time is to be busy. If you’re late, you hurry. If you know time is short, you try to squeeze more in.

Everyone is very busy. This is much like the joke: How do you know if someone does CrossFit? Don't worry; they will tell you in every conversation. People love to tell you how busy they are.

And many people ARE busy. They are juggling multiple jobs, caring for others, and trying to find time for themselves. There are times when this is just reality. But as we get older, and the open weeks in our My Life in Weeks poster dwindle, it is worth wondering if being busy is, counterintuitively, not at all the best response to the anxiety that comes from facing the shortness of life.

Even before incessant buzzes from an iWatch, 17 Zoom meetings a week, and 1,700 time-management gurus, Seneca dropped the mic:

Ouch.

The situation is worse for our younger millennial friends. They grew up with an optimized childhood: tight schedules to fit in piano practice, internships, volunteering, and homework. And the urgency to stay ahead to avoid catastrophically falling behind.

In her article How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Peterson connects the dots between the never-ending push to optimize your life and pervasive burnout. She pushes back against using more hustle and hacks to fix things:

You don’t fix burnout by going on vacation. You don’t fix it through “life hacks,” like inbox zero, or by using a meditation app for five minutes in the morning, or doing Sunday meal prep for the entire family, or starting a bullet journal. You don’t fix it by reading a book on how to “unfu*k yourself.” You don’t fix it with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or “anxiety baking,” or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.

Don’t you love that paragraph?

Prioritization v. optimization

I'm thankful that our Gen X childhoods were not optimized. I played tag football on an asphalt street every afternoon. We got bored. We made up games to play. When the street lights came on, we hydrated at the garden hose, had dinner, and did some homework.

My childhood was not optimized, but it was satisfying. Looking back, I wasn’t frittering time away. I was doing precisely what gives childhood its meaning.

Here, we begin to see that the relationship between time available and things to do is not just about quantity—how can I get as much done in a fixed amount of time? It's about the nature of the things we decide to do.

In his brilliant book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman explains, “The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things."

Going further, he says:

The reason for this effect is straightforward: the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.

This is why I think Tim Urban’s “depressing math” is actually “refreshing math”.

Hit the refresh button. Clear your cache. Empty your trash bin.

Consider if now is the time to re-invest what I’ve called your career capital.

As the Chinese proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

Now is the best time to dig deep and surface your true priorities.

• Who do you want to spend more time with?

• What activities (uses of time) would give you the most satisfaction over time?

• What could you do that would cultivate a sense of meaning?

• What do you want to learn?

• What places do you want to visit or live in?

Prioritization is the key word.

Choosing one thing always means not choosing something else. Abstract priorities always leave too much room for error. If you prioritize seeing as much of the world as possible, you might click on flash sale and spend a week in the Florida panhandle.

Again, from Your Life in Weeks, Tim Urban recommends this framework for an ideal week: 

 A close review of this framework forces you to ask some important questions:

• What do I truly enjoy?

• Am I using my time to improve my life and/or the lives of others?

• Do I enjoy my current life week by week?

 These are all things we’ll dive into more as part of Second Act Creator.

If you know someone struggling with these questions, please forward this email to them.

That’s all for this week.

I hope you found this valuable. Feel free to share it with a friend that needs it.

Enjoy your Sunday,