Summary
Joe addresses the pain of constantly feeling behind on time — whether that’s not getting enough done today or not being where you expected in life. He traces the history of timekeeping from early humans who didn’t even know their age, through town sundials, to everyone carrying synchronized clocks on phones. As time precision increased, so did time anxiety.
He offers three strategies for making time work for you instead of working for time: think like a farmer (plant seeds for the future by doing slightly uncomfortable things today), reorganize your to-do list (find the 1-2-3 things that make everything else easier or irrelevant), and periodically take the 30,000-foot view (am I going where I actually want to go?). He closes with a 14-day experiment: each day, practice one of these three approaches and notice what shifts.
Key Concepts
- Time anxiety grows as time measurement gets more precise
- Think like a farmer — plant seeds for the future
- Find the one thing that makes everything else easier or irrelevant
- Take the 30,000-foot view regularly to stay on course
Key Quotes
“You’re working for time instead of having time work for you. And that’s miserable.”
“As that time has gotten more and more precise, we’ve become more and more anxious with that time.”
“What is the one, two, or three things that I can do that will make everything else on this list easier or irrelevant, completely irrelevant?”
“Every once in a while, you got to stop, pull up. Is this getting me to where I want to go?”
Transcript
What’s clear is you know the pain of constantly feeling like you’re behind on time. Whether that’s I didn’t get enough done today. I need to do more. Or it means you’re not as far ahead as you thought you were going to be. Don’t own the house. Don’t have the job you want. Aren’t married. Whatever it is. And so you’re working for time instead of having time work for you. And that’s miserable. But the truth is having time work for you is is not an a hard thing. It’s actually quite simple. But it does require you to change your perception and perspective of time. The crazy thing about time is if you look at the history of time, it’s weird. So, first of all, early early humans didn’t really even know what age they were. They didn’t even know how many days had gone by. Time was something that you tracked by, you know, when the birds sang or when the moon came up or when the sun was on the horizon at a particular place. That’s how you track time. And then eventually we created trains and the trains needed to be on time so that we had to have a clock and and before there was a clock that had a set time. There was different times for different towns. They’d have sun dials or they’d have clocks based on sun dials. And so the time in the town next to you might have been 5 minutes different than your time. And then we got a phone where everybody has the exact same minute-by-minute time. and and now we’re at a at a meeting and we’re like we’re one minute late and everybody knows you’re exactly one minute late because everybody has the exact same clock on their phone. That’s how much more precise time has gotten. And as that time has gotten more and more precise, we’ve become more and more anxious with that time. But the whole thing is still just an illusion. It’s still just a story that we all believe. And of course we have to live that way because to some degree, you know, our bosses believe it or our investors believe it or our wife believes it and so we’re going to believe that time as well. But to just first see through the nature of time, to see that time is something that is a lot more arbitrary than we think it to be helps relax the system a little bit. Helps you give a little more space between time and yourself. And so once you can do that, once you can get a little space, you can see the the illusionary nature of time, then you can go into three ways to really think about time differently and how to use it. And the first one is to think about time the way a farmer thinks about time. This is a way in which you’re using time rather than time using you. What are the seeds that I can plant for the future that I maybe I have to attend to a little bit, but I don’t have to attend to deeply. So if you’re a farmer, you’re saying this is the time to plant the seed. And then you know because you plant the seed at this time, it’s going to bear fruit at this time. You know that this is the seed, this is the season, and this is the soil to plant the seed in that’s going to allow you to bear fruit. And maybe you have to do a little watering, but generally the work is done for the future. So a great example of this is doing selfwork. If I do the selfwork today, if I say learn how to communicate better and I learn how to communicate better today, that is a seed I plant for the rest of my life. For the rest of my life, I will be able to communicate better. And so part of planting the seed in the future is to say, what’s the slightly uncomfortable thing that I can do? And that’s going to give you a lot of space to figure out, oh, here are the investments I can make for my future. So, the second way is to look at your to-do list completely different. Typically, what we’re doing is we’re saying, “Here’s a to-do list. I need to get it all done.” And there’s a dopamine high. There’s a neurochemical high that comes with that. Oh, I press enter on Slack. I press enter on my email. I feel like I’ve done something. Boom. Get the little dopamine hit. Boom. Get the little dopamine hit. And I feel like I’ve done something. But we’ve all had that experience of like, what did I accomplish? Did I actually move the ball forward in any meaningful way? Or did I just respond to people asking me questions? And so, a great way to think about this is to say, okay, here’s my to-do list for the day or for the week or for the month. What is the one, two, or three things that I can do that will make everything else on this list easier or irrelevant, completely irrelevant? So, let me give you a really simple example of this. Today we’re shooting this video and my producer is watching YouTube videos to do some research and I listen and I hear, “Oh, wait. I hear an ad. What are you doing?” Like, what? What makes you listen to an ad? If you’re researching 20 videos, you’re going to be listening to 20 ads. Those 20 ads are going to be a minute a piece. That’s 20 minutes that you’re wasting just on this video session. What’s the one thing you can do to make everything easier? Well, the one thing to do is to pay to not take ads on your videos. And then how much does that cost? Well, that costs a lot less than your hourly, you know, for a month. So, let’s do that. And the final just simple technique to make time work for you is to actually get the 30,000 foot view every once in a while of what you’re doing. We will spend five, six, seven months in a row answering the emails at 2:00 in the afternoon without thinking, what are we doing? Is this getting us to the place that we really want to be? So, think about it like you’re using a map. There’s several paths that you can go on. And every once in a while, you got to look at your phone or your map and go, “Oh, am I in the place that I’m supposed to be? Yes or no? Is this getting me to where I want to go?” And then once you’ve done that, then you can go back to looking at the trail in front of you. But every once in a while, you got to stop, pull up. Is this getting me to where I want to go? So, a great example of this is the way that we shoot our videos. And it’s really cool because you can actually look back at our videos and see the change that’s happened because of this. So some of our time we’re shooting videos and it feels good and we’re like boom, checking off the box, we got another video done, we got another video done. But some of the time we’re pulling back and we’re saying, “Hey, is this how we want to shoot a video? Is this us? Is this something that we enjoy?” And so maybe we started the way that everybody else shoots videos and then slowly we try another format and then we try another format and we’re constantly iterating to say, “Oh, is this the way that we want to be in the world? Does this feel like it’s getting us to where we want to go?” We have to actually pull back and look at all that stuff instead of just being in that dopamine high of got it done, got it done, got it done, got it done. But in all things, it doesn’t matter what I say. What matters is if it’s true for you. And so here’s an experiment that you can run to see what happens when you have time work for you instead of you work for time. So every day you probably spend time on your calendar or your to-do list. So, you’re going to do that same thing, but instead of doing it the way you normally do it, what you’re going to do is say, “Hey, I’m gonna find one seed I can plant for the future, or I’m going to find one thing that makes everything that I’m going to do easier or irrelevant, or I’m going to stop, take a look, do the 30,000 foot view, and say, “Hey, am I going where I really want to go? And if not, what course correction should I make?” So, you’re just going to do one of those three things every day for two weeks. And you’re going to notice, oh, at the end of those two weeks, what does that feel like? Does it feel like I’m still running around like a chicken with my head cut off, always stressed out, feeling like I haven’t gotten there, or does it feel a lot more like, oh, I am using time to accomplish stuff rather than having time use me?