Delphic Maxim 39: Use time sparingly
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
39. Use time sparingly
If there’s one commodity I wish I had more of, it’s time. I can’t remember where the quote came from — maybe it’s just a meme that was kicking around the internet — but it goes something like this: “Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, [another famous high achiever] all had the same number of hours in the day that you do — what’s your excuse?” It’s savage. Though I do think in some ways we have legitimate excuses.
There is more to take up our time today — we work, we have a far greater range of media to consume for entertainment, we are more distracted than ever, and the economic and political transformations of the past few decades mean we are more individualised and feel less connected to grand social movements than we have in a long while. Calories are more available than at any moment in human history, and our lives are easier and more sedentary than ever, so we need to exercise more. Given all these pressures, naturally it’s hard to ‘find the time’ for a whole set of things we used to do.
About two years ago, I decided to start waking up at 5am to go to the gym. At first it was difficult, but it got easier as the habit set in, and now it’s perfectly natural to wake up that early, most of the time regardless of when I go to bed (though I try to be in bed between 9:30 and 10). That gave me an extra few hours in the morning to read the news over breakfast, try and read a chapter of a book, to scribble some ideas for my thesis, and lately to write a response to these Delphic maxims. It also frees up my evenings for more reading, writing, thinking, creating. Or exercise.
There are time sinks in our lives — social media is the most obvious one. The ‘screentime’ feature on the iPhone is fascinating and confronting, because it shows you just how much of your time each week is poured into the little glowing device in our hands. For ages, Facebook was my most used app. And there’s now a raft of studies that have begun to show how bad Facebook is for our health, and our attention spans. But I don’t need those studies to know it from my own experience: Facebook is an unhealthy distraction, it interrupts my reading, it dulls my ability to write, and hours get sucked into scrolling senselessly through the ‘news’ feed.
So I added a time limit to Facebook: no more than 15 minutes a day. And guess what: suddenly I had a whole lot more time, I read a lot more, and I’ve written a lot more! And I still stay connected with my friend and the world, because 15 minutes is more than enough time, if used sparingly.
Nassim Taleb is quite critical of the relentless consumption of news and analysis. He reckons its better to subscribe to one weekly periodical (The Economist — I agree, it’s excellent), and avoid the constant churn of news. A lot of it is noise. Pointless noise that will be meaningless a week later, and if it’s still important a week later then those weekly periodicals will have picked it up. The frustration with the news for me centres on political articles written about opinion polls. As it currently stands, they haven’t changed significantly for years, and yet journalists report each poll as breathlessly as the last, as though they mean anything new, or add some valuable information to our days. They don’t.
Better to spend your time reading a classic, or a novel that enriches your imagination and expands your vocabulary, or to go for a run or lift some weights or do pilates because it will make you feel healthier and it will, in the long run, give you more time.
Time is unbelievably precious — arguably the most precious and powerful and limited commodity we know. Use it sparingly, and use it wisely. Because once it’s gone, however you use it, there’s no way of getting it back.
