Transcription
Lucius Emmaus Seneca was a Roman statesman and a Stoic philosopher who recognized that if we are to live well, we must be constant students of the greatest subject of all: life itself. In his moral essay, "On the Shortness of Life," Seneca offers us an urgent reminder on the non-renewable "ti" of our most important resource: our time. So, with that in mind, here are 10 of the most important insights for time management from the writings of Seneca.
Number one: Treat time as a commodity. Seneca says, "People are frugal in guarding their personal property, but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are the most wasteful of the one thing in which it's right to be stingy." Seneca cautions that we fail to treat time as a valuable resource, even though it's arguably our most precious and least renewable one. Imagine walking down the street and seeing a really rich guy just throwing his money away. You definitely think that person was insane. And yet, we see others and ourselves throw away something far more valuable every day: our time. The amount we get is uncertain, but surely limited. It's clearly more insane to waste time than money, because unlike money, we can't make anymore when it runs out.
To realize the value of one year, ask a student who failed the grade. To realize the value of one month, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby. To realize the value of one week, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper. To realize the value of one hour, ask the person who just missed a train. To realize the value of one second, ask the person who narrowly avoided an accident. And to realize the value of one millisecond, ask the person who got silver at the Olympics.
While the amount of time we get on this earth is uncertain, the one thing that is certain is that that time is limited. Money and property can increase and decrease depending on our luck or effort, but our time is fixed. Death creeps up on time wasters. People who assume time is cheap, because when employed correctly, time becomes an amplifier. When spent without consideration, it becomes a persistent source of regret.
Number two: Don't invest your time preparing for life. According to Seneca, "He who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow." We are all guilty of spending way too much of our time preparing for life. Seneca pushes us to live right now, to not delay our happiness, to not think that happiness lies in the future. He criticizes those who think that they can work diligently until around age 60, when they finally retire and can be happy. Our future is uncertain, and it's not in your control. The life in the future you're working towards may never come. We're so busy and worried about the future that we often let the present slip away, allowing time to rush past unobserved and uncie's. And then, when we are old and on our deathbeds, we finally realize how short and valuable life is, left with the regret of not making the most of it when we could.
Seneca compares time to a rushing stream that won't always flow. If you're in the middle of a desert, dying of thirst, and you came across a stream of water, but you're not sure when it might stop, wouldn't you drink as much of it as you possibly could? Just like water, we should use as much of our time as possible in making the most of our present. Your 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond are all worth planning, but don't allow them to take away the precious present. You can only live one moment at a time, and you can only live at once. So, choose to live in the moment.
Number three: Live life for your own self. To quote Seneca, "So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles; he has not lived long, just existed long." We all have certain things that we want in our life, whether it's a dream job, a dream house, a dream relationship, or that dream vacation. But the majority of us don't even come close to achieving many of these things because we're stuck with the job we can't stand just to pay the bills, or a partner we pretend to love because we don't want to be alone. You're just being tossed and turned by everything that's coming at you, and in today's world, there's a lot coming at you. We then fool ourselves by telling us that we don't have enough time to try new pursuits. Being busy is always your choice. Being busy with things we don't like is the greatest distraction from living. We routinely coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from ourselves, mistaking the doing for the being.
The best way you can invest your time is by investing in creating a life you love living. If you don't know what you love or what you want, then ask yourself these questions: "If I had more time, what are the things I could do?" or "If I can change something right now, around or about me, what would it be?" You may realize that you want to change your job, or you want to get in shape, or pursue a new hobby. You can start by waking up early and use that extra hour for doing those things that you love. Time is precious, and it's ticking away for all of us. The longer you wait to start making changes, the longer you'll spend your life working to make someone else's dream a reality.
Number four: Practice premeditatio malorum. As we learn from Seneca, "While wasting our time hesitating and procrastinating, life goes on." Procrastination occurs when a conflict between short-term gratification of impulses (like to do nothing and waste time) and the long-term commitments (like making a sales report or editing this video) is won by the former party. In psychology, this is called time inconsistency. Even though doing meaningful work over the course of years is more important to most of us than lounging around, the human brain has a very dated bias towards what is here and now. However, Seneca gives us a way to fight this with a very effective and simple method. The Stoics called it premeditatio malorum. The idea behind this is to ask yourself, before you do something, about what can go wrong. It's a form of negative visualization, and once you've identified the distractions or problems, you can design around them with preparation. By acknowledging distractions beforehand and then, in response, setting a suitable time, place, and starting point, you can bypass the Ilia of short-term impulses ahead of time. If you prepare yourself by a shed you willing ahead, whatever it is you want done, you're 2 to 3 times more likely to follow through.
Number 5: Make long-term rewards immediate. To quote Seneca, "Cutting things off is the biggest waste of life; it snatches away each day as it comes and denies us the present by promising the future." The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy. Our need to procrastinate is most powerful right at the start of work. Even if you've removed all distractions and you're ready to get to work at 8 a.m. as you'd planned, to your brain, the allure of finding an excuse to do something easier is still very strong. The hardest challenge is finding a way to make that starting effort less unpleasant. The key here is expectancy. That's what we crave when we want to delay something that we know benefits us. That's the gap between short-term impulses and long-term reward. The reason that it's often so hard to start something is that there's no expectation of an immediate reward. Sometimes the reward is years away. However, if you bundle your work with the expectancy of an immediate reward, you give yourself a good reason to start. For example, if you procrastinate by watching YouTube, you can make a deal that you're not allowed to watch YouTube until a certain amount of work is done. This way, you get rewarded by completing the unpleasant work with something immediate.
Number six: Make the most of your free time. As we learn from Seneca, "It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements, if it were all well invested." We all work hard to earn two things: money and free time, that we can spend on leisure activities. We work eight to nine hours a day so that we can earn free time, while we endlessly waste that hard-earned free time on the most irrelevant things, like drinking in the pub with coworkers or friends, watching TV shows, or just gossiping around the water cooler. As some people point out, you have to stop and say, "No more! No more wasting the free time you earn." Even if you enjoy working at your day job, keep time spent working at a minimum. You'll never get those overtime hours back; they're gone forever. Most of us spend our precious one-hour lunch breaks eating at our desks. Instead, we should make good of our lunch breaks: read, write, or exercise. If you work in a city, visit a museum or a gallery. Maybe start an office reading group that can meet up at lunch times. On weekends or on evenings, when you've got ample free time, make the most of it by meditating, reading, exercising, or journaling, or anything that could add value to your life. If you want to beat mediocrity and start living your life, then you need to start making the most of your free time.
Number seven: Spend time reflecting on your past. Seneca informs us that "Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, let the present, and fear the future." For Seneca, time is divided into three parts: the present, which is transitory; the future, which is uncertain; and the past, which is unalterable. All the modern time management lessons tell us to focus on the present with a view to the future. They all focus on the uncertain and transitory, whereas Seneca tells us to pay attention to our past. If we are to extend our life, we must have enough self-awareness to remember the lessons of our past so that we can be more effective today. When you actually take a moment to stop and think, to comb through who you've been in the past and really what made you that person, it's pretty enlightening. Reflecting on your past and doing some serious introspection does the soul good. It helps you be present and comprehend the changes within yourself that have occurred. Plus, it gives you a clear, focused idea of who you are today and who you want to be tomorrow. It even helps you take responsibility and ownership of yourself and your actions. Sometimes, it can be difficult for you to see how far you've come, especially if you tend to compare yourself to others, but spending time on reflecting on your past gives you the space and time to see just how far you've come in life.
Number eight: Stop wasting time in life's trivialities. As we learn from Seneca, "If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own." We are all guilty of spending way too much of our time in trivialities. More and more of our time nowadays is spent staring at screens, either for work or on social media, trawling through yet more status updates and posting endless selfies. How often are we caught in giving up our time to others for nothing more than the pursuit of monetary or social profit? Casually playing a video game with no particular merit is throwing time away. Time you could be developing a useful skill, exercising, or edifying yourself with literature, art, or music. The same can be said of social media. Like other open-ended forms of entertainment, social media is designed and optimized to consume your time. If people came up to you all day asking for $20, you'd tell them to get lost. But people all day long come up to you, whether in person or on the phone, or via email, or even SMS, to ask for your time, and you just hand it on over. We must be devoted to living for ourselves, at least most of the time. The person who says yes to everyone's requests will soon find that they've no time of their own and that they're living for other people, not themselves. Those who are happy fill their time with activities that are valuable and meaningful to their own vision of life.
Number 9: Invest your time creating new memories. To quote Seneca, "You have been preoccupied while life hastens on; meanwhile, death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that." If you give a rich man money, he'll try to double it by investing in places where he'll get maximum returns. Similarly, we should all invest our time wisely, and the best returns we can get with our time is by investing it in creating new memories and in philosophies. Seneca tells us that memory is more enduring than grief. We spend too much of our time in chasing that which makes our short lives shorter, like luxuries and leisure, so that once we get old, we regret not living at all. One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation, says Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University who's been studying the question of money and happiness for over two decades. In Gilovich and other researchers have found that memories from life experiences, as fleeting as they may be, deliver more lasting happiness than things. Memories guide our thoughts, actions, and decisions; they shape who we are. You can start creating new memories by taking on new challenges, by spending time with people you love, traveling, and sinking new opportunities. Buying an Apple Watch isn't gonna change who you are. Taking a break from work to hike the Appalachian Trail from start to finish most certainly will. We are not our possessions, but we are the accumulation of everything we've seen, the things we've done, and the places we've been.
Number 10: Invest your time in philosophies. In our final piece of wisdom from Seneca for this video, we learn, "Of all people, only those who are at leisure, who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive; for they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs. All the years that have passed before them are added to their own." Seneca points to the study of philosophy as the only worthwhile occupation of the mind and spirit, an invaluable teacher that helps us learn how to inhabit our own selves fully in this brief and transient spell of existence and expands our short lives sideways so that we may live wide rather than long. Philosopher means lover of wisdom. Philosophy is a study of truth, virtue, life, and death. Nothing in this world is permanent except the truth. The philosopher's will always seek to discover the truth of the way this world is and what our role is within it. You can start with reading good books that have been written in the service of you. The knowledge and wisdom they hold is condensed time, and that time compressed into their pages add to your time.
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