Time is the universal currency. We use time. We save time. We have all the time in the world. Yet, time is a limited resource; everyone runs out someday.
The saying goes, “live as if today is your last day on earth.”
Our lives are built around this notion of time. We define monumental changes in responsibility through the passage of time. When are you allowed to drive? 16 years old. When are you allowed to vote? 18 years old. Time is a social symbol as well. The elderly are often seen as the wise, and the members with more experience are seen as the leaders.
Everyone has conceptualized the notion of time. We know that we should retire in our 60s. We know about when to get that first job. In fact, this concept is so widespread that over 95 percent [1] of people retire by the age of 70. Despite the universality of time, some people are still able to accomplish significantly more in their lifetimes than others. While some have built empires, others have become idle.
These days, people have begun to strive towards living a life that feels more fulfilling. One where they can visit the beautiful landmarks, raise a loving family, and maintain a group of close-knit friends. You can think of life as an optimization of your time. What are the things that you will do that will either achieve your goals more quickly or more plentifully?
So how are you going to maximize what you do with your time?
“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time”
— Leo Tolstoy
Time at Scale
The average person looks at social media for 144 minutes per day [2]. This already seems like a lot of time by itself, but it pales in comparison to the time spent over a lifetime.
If we assume each person will live to 79.5 years [3], and this consumption stays constant throughout their life, then we can their calculate total time spent on social media.
Almost 8 whole years! To put that into perspective, a relatively long vacation takes about 2 weeks. That equates to over 200 two-week long vacations. Imagine how much time could be spent at the beach, or how many landmarks you could have visited. In fact, eight years is enough time to develop the iPhone, with 3 remaining years left over.
In order to create this time, brainstorm of something that you do everyday that you can make more efficient.
For me, this activity was typing. In second grade, our teacher would assign us typing assignments. Typing them up was a long, boring, 20 minute long assignment.
Well, at least, until I learned how to type quickly.
In the following month, I taught myself how to type at 60 WPM, rather than the chicken-pecking nonsense I was doing earlier. Suddenly, the 20 minute long assignment turned into 3 minutes, and the more I exercised typing, the faster I got. By the end of the semester, the long 20 minutes had been minimized to nearly 2 minutes. Almost a 10x increase in productivity!
This skill has carried through all my life, and I am even using it to type this Medium article. By typing quickly, I can articulate ideas faster and more accurately.
Let’s estimate my times savings. I think a fair underestimate of this would be saving 10 minutes per day, as I generally spend hours on my computer daily.
Over 60 hours per year! That’s almost equivalent to an entire semester’s worth of work, coming in at the small cost of 10 minutes per day. Imagine how many additional hours this would save if extrapolated to a lifetime. It’s simply an incredible boost in productivity by such learning how to effectively make a simple task more efficient.
Key Takeaways
There are several things that you can do to achieve a similar performance gain.
Find that boring task, and try to speed it up. It could be anything from folding clothes quicker to purchasing faster hardware.
Minimize your distractions. Even if you are spending 2 hours on a something, working on that topic at only 50% of your true capabilities equates to someone working 1 hour at their 100%.
Don’t burn out. Sure, being more productive is nice. But burning out stalls progress, and ultimately leaves you in a position worse than if you had taken something at a slower pace.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
Finally, remember that progress is incremental. The extra savings of a semester doesn’t occur in one day, it occurs through years, and sometimes even lifetimes. And whether you realize it or not, you are still making progress.
References
[1] 2017 Federal Reserve Survey of Household Economics and Decision-making.
[2] https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/average-daily-time-on-social-media
[3] http://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/
