The Time of Our Lives
The trap none of us can escape
Time is a trap.
Though it may not seem like it, time is the trap that both binds us to the present moment and tears us from it. Perhaps more than anything else in the world, time is the greatest currency.
One can always make more money. One can never make more time.
The Stoics were adamant about properly watching their time. Seneca spoke often about how fools put tasks off to tomorrow in an effort to avoid them today. But who is guaranteed a tomorrow he would say?
“Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone,” Marcus Aurelius would remind himself.
So while some ignore doing things today in light of tomorrow, others attempt to maximize the day by becoming as productive as possible. They look for ways to gain back time. They want to maximize the output they have. A single task is not good enough, they want to accomplish eight tasks.
This too is a trap, however, as the productivity game is itself a trap. Roughly 80 years ago, there was a newspaper article that stated due to the increase in technology, by the turn of the century, humans would be working less than four hours a day. Instead, we work more now than ever before.
The bottom line: If you have the time and are willing to give it to something, that something will take it. If that is an idea of being more productive, to save time, ensure that the productivity does not become the end goal.
Productivity saves time but is not everything.
As Oliver Burkman explained in his book Four Thousand Weeks:
“The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”
If you are looking for, or building more productivity into your life to save time and get things done, but then you never actually have time for yourself and only use that time for more productivity, then you haven’t really gained time back to be free, to be in control of your life, you’ve just handed it over and masked it under the guise of productivity. The idea of productivity now for freedom of the future only works if you take that future time.
If we can’t focus our attention, then our productivity is essentially wasted time.
It is what we give our time over to, what we are paying attention to, what we are focused on, this is what matters. This is how we escape the time trap. Because we truly only have the present moment. And so if we are not utilizing it to drive proper attention to something we actually want to focus on, then we’re missing out on the point of productivity.
Laziness is a trap. Productivity, if not used correctly, is a trap. The present moment, the here and now, this is what is real.
Marcus Aurelius once wrote to himself:
“Even if you're going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you're living now, or live another one than the one you're losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can't lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don't have?”
Again, bringing us back to the present. If we’re going to trade our time today to give us back more time tomorrow, we have to actually take and utilize that time tomorrow, not become bogged down in the game of productivity for productivity’s sake.
Time and attention drive our lives. Without applying proper attention to either, we lose control over our lives. If we cannot control our attention, we cannot control where we spend our time.
If you've seen the present moment, then you have everything you need to see Marcus Aurelius once wrote to himself.
So if you only have a limited time on this earth, what will you do with it? Where will you put your attention?
Thank you again for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to heart, comment, or ask questions about this post. Suggestions are always appreciated and considered.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo