how we spend our days

one of my favorite quotes of all time is from writer Annie Dillard:

“how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”

half of life is spent taking care of our bodies. i.e. sleeping, eating, bathing, grooming.

that leaves about 12 hours for everything else, if you’re lucky.

everything we spend time on requires focus. it’s like we have expendable units of focus, or tokens, that we constantly choose to spend.

thinking about someone that wronged you? focus token.

Our focus is limited both by time and energy (will).

some things require more focus, like studying, reading, deep work, facetimes

other things are passive like driving, some phone calls (sorry, mom).

obviously, there’s a correlation between presence and focus.

there’s no doubt that your presence in large part determines your ability to cash in your focus tokens.

Have you ever cooked high? you're creative, in the zone, happy to just be in a kitchen.

that’s the flow of presence.

with about 12 waking hours that we get to use, our time can only go to so many places

for most people, 5 days out of the week, 7–9 of those hours go to the corporate enslavement.

and unless you have a personal assistant, in the remaining 25–15 hours you gotta find time to take care of errands, exercise maybe, call your fam, call or see friends, read a book

life is not the vacations you get to take

the small 2-day getaway
the week around the holidays
the Friday night happy hour
Saturday date night.

most of life is all the other stuff. and a lot of the other stuff is ~12 hours of just taking care of our bodies

then we get to fill it. but not really. because we all have to work unless we win the lottery,

and there’s a relationship between income per time worked and your financial obligations, not counting contractual obligations to work even when you don’t want to work more if you’re not an Uber driver.

How are you spending your days?

Because it’ll be how you’ve spent your life.