How to stop wasting time
We are all hypocrites.
Not in a cruel intentional way, more of a very fucking stupid way.
If you ask the average person about the most valuable thing in their life, without any hesitation most people would say time, they would then drown you in cliches until your head explodes.
Yet they are the same people that have no problem averaging 8 hours of screen time.
Their actions and beliefs are in two different worlds
They’re liars, hypocrites and worst of all, idiots.
I know this sounds harsh, but i am not talking about a one time mistake, Im talking about a lifestyle that survives from lying to yourself.
We are all guilty of a bit of hypocrisy.
And the reason is not because we are “wasting time”
It is because our concept of time is flawed at it’s core.
Benjamin franklin says “time is money”
I say fuck him
Time is not a commodity, Time is not a currency and without a fucking doubt, time is not money.
Time is your life
There is no difference between your time and your life.
For the past week I have been using them as interchangeable terms, I stopped saying “I’m wasting my time” and instead said “this is how I am choosing to live my life”
And suddenly half of the things I was doing felt harder to justify.
Because i wasn’t making a mistake, i was not messing around like other 17 year olds.
No, I was making a conscious decision of how I wanted to spend my life.
And for decades we all got this idea engraved in our heads.
Everyone wants to convince you to optimize and manage your time as if its an empty bucket to be filled with as many things as possible, this is the norm of society.
I call bullshit.
What I see is that we turned time into a currency and then put it at the bottom of our priorities, we live like we are immortal, like tomorrow is guaranteed.
You would never throw money out the window but you have no problem with doing nothing on your phone for three hours.
Again, hypocrisy.
If I told you that you had 3 years to live I could bet my life on you not spending nearly as much time scrolling on your phone.
How short does that number have to go for you to realize that your time is limited?
This is the reason old people complain that “life is short”
No it isn’t, you just invested so much of it into useless shit.
When it comes to how people see time, I see three types.
I. The immortal
II. The lost mortal
III. The enlightened mortal.
I. The immortal
This is the type of person who sees nothing wrong with spending three hours a day watching videos and putting off the things that will push him towards his goals.
Their motto is “Tomorrow!”
Gym? Tomorrow.
Reading? Tomorrow
Meditation?
Can you guess what he’s gonna say?
This persons mind consists of two beliefs
Tomorrow is guaranteed
I will never run out of time
For the longest time, I was like this too.
I put off everything.
Studying
self improvement
My MMA classes
Everything.
And when I realized that I was using my time like an idiot I tried to fix my situation, but i somehow dug myself in a deeper hole.
II. The lost mortal
The first thing I did when I realized I probably shouldn’t spend half of my day in front of a screen was jump into the productivity culture. I felt good about myself, I felt like I was moving forward, that I was no longer “wasting” my time.
But the reality of it was that I was drowning in productivity techniques that I forgot the next day. I was watching 40 minute videos instead of doing the actual work, and I did more productivity research to keep myself busy, I felt fulfilled, but I was still not using my time the way I wanted to.
I beautified procrastination and disguised it as productivity.
Productivity stopped being a tool and became an identity.
I was trying to make sure every moment of my life was optimized, every moment of my life was productive, I ultimately failed.
But what if I succeeded? Is that any better?
well…no.
The culture of efficiency per hour comes from work, specifically three hundred years back when people started being paid hourly.
I was trying to adapt the mindset of a 40 year old man slaving away to feed his children.
And here’s the thing that makes this trap work
Busyness feels like work, if you’re busy you feel like you’re moving the needle.
But busyness is just input into a method of work
And most of the time, your method is going to suck.
For example, imagine two people thousands of years back being tasked with building a pyramid.
The first person brute forces their way through it, builds muscle and trains all day to build the pyramid, lets call him Ahmose
The second person does nothing, sat in his room with books.
By year one? Ahmose built the base of the pyramid, and Narmer’s land is still empty.
By the second year, Ahmose starts to struggle, but he trains harder to lift the heavy stones.
By year three? Ahmose is on his third tier of the pyramid. And Narmer is on his sixth.
Narmer didn’t stack stones, he spent years building a machine to build it for him
Ahmose beats Narmer in pure effort, but effort is not the driver of success, in life or in time.
You need the right function, a function that brings you a good output for your input.
Don’t get caught up in productivity techniques like I did, they are tools, not a lifestyle.
And don’t get caught up in busyness, you’re still not accomplishing anything.
III. The enlightened mortal
When I reached this stage, I stopped wasting time. not a second, not a minute, nothing.
And while doing this, I played video games this morning after the gym, I scrolled every now and then and I did alot of stupid shit.
I still did some of my bad habits, but i was more aware of what I was doing, I was more accountable.
You unlock this stage the moment you stop thinking of time as a commodity.
You will be more accountable, you will be more careful, and you will be disgustingly frugal with your time (which is a good thing..)
I first thought of this in the middle of a school concert, while everyone was enjoying the band’s music, i was staring at the ceiling and thinking about time.
It then turned into me treating my time like it was a god sent gift (this happened while i was reading a book about time on my sisters big hello kitty cushion)
So the summary of this section? Hello kitty cushions give you good insights.
By now I hope that your understanding of time changed.
But you still need to understand one thing.
When you gain awareness of the choices you’re making. You need to delete influences around you.
You are the driver of your life, you are behind the steering wheel. But you have the loudest passengers ever.
Social media, friends and family, society as a whole.
I am not telling you to isolate yourself from society and live on a mountain, but be wary of the influences around you.
Many times we find that our life took a sharp turn because one of the passengers got their hands on the wheel.
Take control of the wheel
And to answer the question of this article, how to stop wasting time.
The answer is that you never wasted time to begin with.
You made decisions and were fooled into thinking you were wasting time
Your time is your life
You cant waste aliveness, you can only choose what to do with it :).