Lack of Time Is an Illusion

Lack of Time Is an Illusion 

“He who gains time gains everything.” -BENJAMIN DISRAELI 

I have a full understanding that time itself is finite. The main idea here is the “lack” we feel when it comes to utilizing time to work on habits to better serve our authentic self is a complete illusion. We are constantly exchanging things of real value for things of little to no value. Whenever time is spent mindlessly on a low value activity, we have just spent the most precious resource we have. We must pay attention to how we spend our greatest resource and should guard it at all costs. Many experts will say that an hour a day focused on a project can change your life. James Clear only asks for 2 minutes! At least to start the habit. The issue is that we have set up excuses that we use as roadblocks to keep ourselves in our comfortable average life. These roadblocks are either placed in front of us by mindlessly following America’s frequency of mediocrity or they are built with fear. Either way, you need to identify your excuse and make the decision to overcome the obstacle or leave it and stay where you are. 

I am starting with time because using the excuse of not having the time is the easiest way to kick the can of progress down the road. You can find countless examples of people who are busier than you, and making more progress in all the areas you keep making excuses about. “I cannot get in shape because I do not have enough time” cannot be used when Jeff Bezos is in better shape than me and is running Amazon and Blue Origin at the same time. When a 60-year-old human who is responsible for a trillion-dollar business and flying rockets into space can squeeze in an hour of time for cardio, it becomes impossible to build a case that whatever schedule you happen to have is too busy to spend time working on yourself. When you really break down your day like a budget it becomes obvious that the illusion we create around lack of time is figment of our imagination. Arnold Schwarzenegger wrote about this in his new book...  

Arnold’s 24-Hour Breakdown 

8       Hours for sleep 

30    minute morning routine  

45    minute commute to work 

8.5   Hours Work 

45    minutes commute home 

3.5   hours of quality time with friends and family 

1       hour exercise 

1       hour life changing project/habit 

24     hours 

Somewhere out there in Ohio my snarky brother Dan is asking his wife how much time Arnold allocates for the nanny- I get it no one is perfect Dan! The next thing Arnold tells people to do is to open their phone and open settings and go to see their screen time. Then proceed to erase all those hours from your daily budget and realize where this time debt is coming from in your schedule. We all doom scroll on our pocket mind control device. I cannot imagine someone having less than two hours of screen time if they are not making a constant conscious effort to mitigate the time they are scrolling. The fact of the matter is if you are using the excuse “I do not have time” it is time to learn how to use a time budgeting technique such as timeboxing to create time in your schedule and eliminate this excuse. 

Now that you have freed some time let us talk about the tremendous benefit that just 3 hours/week or 30 minutes/day will do to your chances of living a longer life. Going from zero minutes a week to 3 hr/wk will reduce your all-cause mortality by 50% [12:40]. This means that freeing up 3 hr/wk and dedicating that to exercise would reduce your chances of dying more than if a smoker gave up smoking- DON'T SMOKE!!! Unless you want to, but just know the trade off! The great news is if you happen to open more time for exercising, the benefits will only go up from there! 

I feel like most of my conversations end with the ole... “At the end of the day,” but at the end of the day any time you can give yourself today dedicated to exercise/training/health will help you increase your chances to accumulate the most precious resource we have later in life. It is important to consistently prioritize your time daily now to give this amazing gift to your future self. Try to envision your future 80-year-old self, thanking your past self for putting in the consistent work today to help make their existence possible. If you desire to give yourself more time, carve into your daily routine time dedicated to your health and start/continue the path to a stronger, healthier, and hopefully longer life on this wonderful planet. 

“Remember how long you’ve been putting this off . . . that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.” -Marcus Aurelius 

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