The Ultimate Non-Renewable Resource: Time

“We don’t beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well.”

-Randy Pausch (1960-2008), The Last Lecture at Carnegie Mellon

Above: Mr. Pausch giving “The Last Lecture”

That’s a powerful quote.  If you haven’t viewed the last lecture, do it after you read this article!  It was spoken by a man shortly before he died.  By a man who lived his life well.

I think the time you have in life is like a basketball game.  It’s not about making the game go on forever.  It’s about playing well while you’re on the court.  It’s about making those minutes, however many you get, count.  And as I know, you can’t always control how many minutes you get!

When you think about it, the quality time we have in any given day is so short.  by this I mean the time we have to live well, or to move ourselves toward living better.  David Allen, the time management guru, breaks our time down into four quadrants:

QI- Important and Urgent (Emergencies, impending deadlines, must-do now)

Q2 - Important, not Urgent (Planning, investing, true recreation, relationship building)

Q3 - Not Important, Urgent (Phone calls, emails, interruptions)

Q4- Not Important or Urgent (trivia, time wasters, irrelevant email, facebook!)

In reality the only real growth, and where we ultimately want to be, is Quadrant 2.  Be a Q2 person. Q2 is where we spend our time doing what’s important.  Putting “first things first.”  This is where we might plan that vacation we always wanted to go on, or sort out our finances, or prepare for the day ahead, revise our resume, go for a run, hanging out with the family, redefine our life goals & values, learn a language.  All of these things advance what we really want in life.

The point here is that the typical corporate America day goes something like this:

Wake up - Q1

Shower, eat, get ready for work - Q1

Commute to work - Q1

Respond to urgent crises @ work and deal with whatever has magically piled up on our desk overnight- Q1

Respond to emails, phone calls, BS with coworkers - Q3,Q4

Lunch - Q1

More of Pre-lunch activities.  Meeting 5pm deadlines - Q1, 3, 4

Commute home, Eat - Q1

Veg out by the TV and/or go drink way too much to defer work for another day- Q4

Stay up too late, sleep - Q1

The main point I’m making here is that a lot of our days (and weeks, months, years) go in distinct phases.  And the truth is that most of the time we spend, we have to.  Obviously we have to eat, sleep, respond to emergencies, etc.  But the antidote to emergencies is preparation, and that happens in Q2.

I figure that in a given standard day, we have two major blocks of Q2 time:

1. In the morning, 30 minutes after arrving until 30 minutes before lunch

2. In the evenings, 30 min after dinner until 30 min before bed

The reason I say two, and not three (12:30-4:30pm, for instance) is because of human nature.  We think the best in the mornings and the evenings, not the afternoon.  This is due specifically to a phenomenon known as the Circadian Rhythm:

The Circadian Rhythm, pictured above, shows our typical alertness pattern in a given day.  As you’ve probably noticied, we are very alert from around 6 or 8 in the morning until just before lunch.  I know personally that just before lunch, when I’m thinking “oh, lunch is coming up,” my speed slows down.  I start wrapping things up for lunch, which means I’m out of flow and not producing at the same rate.

Just after lunch I am very unproductive.  I am a) digesting and b) ready for a nap.  Drowsiness persists until about 2-3 and then I am on again until 5.  The problem here is that this time usually consists of completing deadline projects; Q1, not Q2.

We are also surprisingly alert in the evenings after dinner until 30 min before sleep. The reason I say 30 min before sleep instead of actual sleep: If you’ve ever read a book in bed, you know that these last 30 minutes of drifting in and out with the pages on your face are not the most productive!  (Though enjoyable.)  Altogether I believe this adds up to about four hours, two per session, of absolute prime, uninterupted Q2 time. This incidentally also jibes with the thinking of Tim Ferris, author of “The Four-hour Workweek,” who believes we only have about that much peak time every day to work toward our highest goals.

The good news here is that in those two periods, we can achieve a ton!  At work, what are your top long-term goals and what actions can you take to prepare for, or actually take action on, those goals?  At home, how can you best spend those precious few hours before bed on changing your life, goals, relationships, or preparing for the coming day? It really is amazing the results you get over time with a 30 min run & crunches in the evening or 30 min language program on tape in the mornings.

With all of that said, the goal here isn’t ruthless efficiency.  Life is to be enjoyed and spending quality time with friends and family or even meditating, etc is perfectly valid Q2 time.  None of this is strict but Allen’s idea with the Q’s is to make us aware of the different ways we spend our time.  The best news is that like any good investment, it pays dividends well into the future.  It’s sort of like compound interest. But squander it, and you’ll never get it back.

Use your time to persue a new idea at work or language at home, and you could easily be getting that promotion or talking to that cute German girl in New Zealand before you know it! And that, take it from me, is a good thing.

Now consider the difference in results you could achieve by using your four hours a day wisely for the next day, month or week.. and extrapolate to your whole life!  I think the impact is amazing.

How do you spend your four hours?

Thanks for reading,

Matt

And with that I am drifting off with the laptop closing intermittently on my head…  My four hours are over for today!