Seneca
Time is the one cost you cannot earn back
Price things in hours before you price them in money
On the Shortness of Life
The same man haggles over a small bill and gives away a whole evening without a thought. Where the arithmetic goes wrong.
What actually happened?
The essay has one argument. It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. He is savage about the busy — men occupied with everybody's affairs but their own, who find at the end that they spent the whole of life getting ready to live. And he points at an asymmetry: people guard money down to the last coin and hand out their time to anyone who asks. Money lost can be earned again. His conclusion is not gloomy: life is long enough, if you know how to use it.
Convert the cost from money into hours
The question to ask of a commitment is not what it costs but how many of your hours it takes, and where those hours would otherwise have gone. Run the conversion and a mass of apparently free consumption shows up: the free meeting, the small favour, the thing you had to attend.
Price a three-hour dinner at your own hourly rate and write the number on paper. Most people decline on the spot.
The most expensive waste is living on someone else's agenda
His busy men are not idle. They are the most industrious people in the book, and their time is full of other people's business, every item of it with a good reason. That is exactly the danger: no single item looks refusable, and the sum of them is a life.
Every entry in the calendar can justify itself and not one of them was your idea. What needs cutting is not an entry, it is the default of saying yes.
You do not have to be ready in order to begin
His sharpest observation is that people postpone living: after the promotion, once the children are grown, in retirement. The future is the least reliable asset there is. A life spent in preparation is not a short life, it is one that never started.
Once this project is over, I will — if you have been saying that for three years, what it needs is not a better moment but one small step today.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: the week is full, every item is defensible, and you cannot name one thing in it you chose.
Ask first: how many hours does this take, where would those hours have gone, and who is writing my calendar?
Where it goes wrong: running the ledger on the people closest to you; or using my time is precious as cover for work you owe.
Lines to keep
Life, if you know how to use it, is long.
You live as if you were destined to live for ever.
Price it in hours first. The money question hides the real cost.
Same situation, other people are asking
My calendar is full and none of it is mine.The same task costs me more than it costs everyone else.I finished nothing today and I'm too tired to speak.I gave these years to the work and the friendships went quiet.Too busy to have a life · all 8 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.