What’s The Value of Your Time?

(Yes, all the time you don't have)

One of the biggest hurdles I help my clients with is time. How to rework their time, their day, their calendar, so they can fit healthier habits into their already jammed schedules. 

You can probably relate. Often the reason people don’t exercise or sleep or meditate or breathe deeply or eat nutritiously is time—the perceived lack of it. 

Yet, we all have the same amount of time in the day. So why do some people seem to get it all done and others don’t? Are they better? No, not at all. 

More likely, they have figured out how to make choices. They’ve done the work to know what their priorities are, and are willing to chose. 

Brad Aeon, time management expert and TEDx speaker, said it beautifully: “When it comes to time, we can either make sacrifices or we can make excuses.” 

Tyranny of Choice

The sacrifice is choosing. Because, as he points out, we actually have more time than previous generations. With that, comes the tyranny of choice, or the paradox of choice, as Barry Schwartz, psychologist and TED speaker, phrased it. 

The Paradox of Choice principle stats that an abundance of choice often leads to feelings of anxiety, loneliness and depression, rather than increasing our capacity to make a decision.

The fear of making the wrong choice paralyzes us. Or, if we make a choice, our sense of accomplishment and satisfaction is usually less than it would have been, had we had fewer choices to start with. 

When it comes to time, Aeon states that, “I don’t have time is the biggest lie in the history of mankind.”

We have more time than previous generations and more choices on how to spend it. We tell ourselves we don’t have time, he says, because once we realize how much time we do have, we have to also accept that it’s up to us how we spend it. 

The onus is on US. The control is ours. And that, is too scary, because of the paradox. Because of the fear of missing out. Because…what if you choose wrong?

“So we say we don’t have time because it’s reassuring.”

Time is Life Not Money

Theophrastus said, “Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” 

Seneca said, “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.”

We often say that time is money. But time, as these philosophers note (and Aeon reminds us), is more than money. Time is life. 

The way to manage time, is then to think of it as life. When you decide how you will spend your time, ask yourself, is this worth my life? 

See whether it’s easier to prioritize, and whether you now have the time to move, to sleep, to breathe, to chew.