You never really have time

(clock ticking) - I wanna move now at this point in the course from the topic we've been discussing up to now, which is mainly to do with how little time we have in a day and in a life, and how to deal with that situation when it comes to making effective use of your time. And to move to the deeper question of how little control we have over our time, even the amount of it we do get. And in fact, in a sense, even though I've been talking about how little time we get, when you stop and think about it, it's not really clear that we get any time at all, right? When you say something like, "I've got three hours to complete this project," or "I've got a week's holiday before I have to do any work." What we mean in that situation always is that we expect that time, right? It means we've got good reason to believe that we'll get those three hours, or that, that week will be uninterrupted. In fact, you just get one moment of time, right? So, it's not like physical possessions or money. You don't have 4,000 weeks of life like you have a pair of shoes or you have £100 in the bank. You just expect it. And all you get, all anybody gets, or even the most powerful person in the world ever gets, right? Is just that one moment, followed by the next moment, followed by the next moment. So, we don't really have any possibility of truly controlling our quotient of time on the planet. We just have the possibility of navigating as well as we can from moment to moment to moment. Sounds like a bit of a sort of theoretical point, but I think it really, really matters, because an awful lot of the ways in which we approach time, the ways in which we try to build meaningful lives and do effective things with our time, are all kind of premised on this notion that we're going to achieve a certain kind of control over it. That in fact, we actually, can't ever achieve. So, we're always sort of using plans, using scheduling, using lists as a way of trying to control more than this moment when in fact all we ever get is this single moment. A really interesting thought experiment for you to do about your own life is to look backwards. Look at everything that brought you to where you are today. Now, if you think about anything that you like about your life, maybe you like where you live, you are proud of your children, you are happy about the relationship you are in, or the job you do, something like that. And then think about how it came to be working your way backwards through the causal chain that brought you there. It's almost guaranteed, in fact I think it probably is guaranteed that none of that involved you controlling your fate. It didn't involve you controlling your time. It was randomness, it was coincidence, it was being introduced at the party to the person who became your future spouse. It was your parents moving to a different neighborhood and turned out that at that school there was a teacher who was really great teacher and saw that actually, even though you seemed so unpromising, you had this gift for words, or for music, or for sport, right? It's some random combination of factors that were beyond your control. And of course, you really want to get philosophical and existentialist about it, you go back to the question of, you know, you didn't choose your parents. The fact that you were born relied on your parents meeting, relied on their sets of parents meeting each other. It goes on and on and on back to the beginning of time, all of it outside your control. And so, all sorts of fantastic things I hope have happened to you in your life without you having this control. And yet, the stance that so many of us move into the future with in our lives is that we need this control. That we're worried and bothered when it feels like we don't know what's coming next. We're trying to find ways to increase the predictability of what's happening. We feel that we need other people to behave in certain ways so that we can make things happen the way we need to. And yet, time and and time again, we have this evidence that it was actually, our lack of control of our time that led to these positive things. So, this doesn't really belong in the category of very practical time management techniques. I have one of those coming at the end of this lesson, but I think it's just a question of learning to loosen up a little bit on that mental stance of, okay, I need to be able to predict things and know what's coming down the pike. And the way to do that is to spend some time reflecting about how you got to where you are today and understanding that you got there without any of this control that you think you need. And I think a lot of wise time management and finding peace of mind in time really has to do with making this perspective shift. Learning to understand that actually, things have gone pretty well for you to get to this point without that kind of control. So maybe you don't need to struggle and to worry so much about attaining that kind of control in the future. There's a second aspect to our lack of control over time, which I think is really interesting. And again, it's a sort of a perspective shift that helps some people derive much more pleasure and value and joy from their experience of time, which is the notion that the really extraordinary thing about our moments on the Earth is not so much exactly what we do with them, whether we are using them well, whether good things or bad things are happening, but the very fact that they're there at all, right? The idea that we have time on the planet rather than what it is we're doing with our time on the planet. Now, these sets of insights and philosophy go back to Heidegger, who is notoriously one of the most completely incomprehensible philosophers who has ever lived. And I'm not going to ruin your day by going too deeply into the work of Heidegger here, but to suffice it to say, one of the insights here is just this notion that there's a kind of a joy and an absorption in life to come from seeing this fact, right? Just sort of thinking about what the odds were that you would never have been born in the first place. And the fact that you get this moment of time, and it has for some people, this transformative effect such that it enables 'em to find fulfillment in moments that might otherwise not be too fulfilling. I've certainly found this very useful in the context of things like waiting in queues or being woken by a screaming baby at two o'clock in the morning when you'd rather be asleep. And all these kind of aspects of life that we file away very instinctively as just really unpleasant, and it would be best if we didn't have to ever go through them. But there's this layer beneath that, which you can sometimes access, which is like, how amazing to even be a conscious human being getting to have this experience. I write in my book "4,000 Weeks" about a person who lost a very close friend and mentor of his. A guy who died sort of prematurely, and it was a big shock. And the surviving man found himself in the months after that loss, found himself thinking about his friend whose name was David. You know, he'd be sitting in a traffic jam and he'd think, what would David have given to be able to be in this traffic jam? You know, what would David have given to be able to be listening to this hold music, while he waited an hour for someone on his bank's customer service line to finally talk to him? I'm not particularly recommending that this is a way to make yourself tolerate aspects of human existence that none of us should have to tolerate, but it's a really interesting thing to keep in your back pocket. I think a sort of insight to remind yourself about when the content of experience seems difficult, seems rough, seems boring. There is that layer that is just like, it's pretty extraordinary that the experience exists in the first place. I wanted to close out this lesson by talking about one final way in which I think our attempt to get control over time, actually gets in the way of our using time most enjoyably and usefully and productively. And to leave you with one sort of practical technique that I think you can implement on the basis of that. We hear so much these days in the self-help productivity, personal development space about the importance of building good habits. And people are kind of obsessed with the idea of building good habits. And so, they embark on these schemes where they decide that every day for the next six months or every day forever, they're going to do this or that. They're gonna run through a list of healthy, positive behaviors that they want to inculcate. And I'm not quite gonna go as far in this lesson as telling you that you shouldn't try to develop good habits. I think that would be contrarian in the extreme. But there is a really interesting thing that happens. It's happened to me and I expect it might have happened to you when you try to embark on these kinds of habit-building projects. Which is that the project of trying to change the kind of person you are, you know, to become the kind of person who goes running every morning, to become the kind of person who meditates for 20 minutes a day, it actually gets in the way of just doing those activities. It becomes so much more of a sort of big and intimidating project that you procrastinate on it more than you otherwise would've done. I'll give you a concrete example. I was contacted by somebody when I wrote about this who had decided that what he was gonna do was he was gonna become the kind of person who sent appreciative notes to coworkers and to people in his extended family and friends, right? Whenever he had the thought like that he really appreciated somebody in his life, he was gonna send them a message, and he was gonna do that like three times a week. That was gonna be his habit. Three times a week he was gonna do this. He got very enthusiastic about this, but then when it came, when the rubber hit the road, when it came time to do this, he realized that actually on a given day he would find that he didn't really have time or inclination to send such a note, so he wouldn't do it. And then before he knew it, it'd be Friday and it seemed a bit much to do three in a day. And he would actually find himself in a situation where precisely because he'd created this whole project, he was gonna become a different kind of person, there were moments in that week where he could have just written one note. Maybe he wouldn't have done three, maybe he wouldn't have kept up a consistent habit, but he could have just done the thing once and he didn't because he told himself, I don't have the time or the energy to make this be part of the habit that I'm trying to build. People do this a lot with writing for some reason, right? They get it into their heads that they really want to build a writing habit, and then they think to themselves, well, I'd like to write for an hour every day. And maybe they do it for a couple of days, and then something gets in the way so they don't do it on the third day. And then they think, well, my habit's been destroyed, and it's six months before they turn back to writing. Or they think to themselves, I wanna do this for half an hour a day, but things are busy right now, so I'm going to postpone this big life change for six months until I can expect to have more time. And in both cases, this attempt to build a habit has got in the way of what they could have done, which is just one session of writing when the hour did arise. The career coach Barbara Cher, always used to say that, you know, if you really wanna be a screenwriter, for example, there are two ways to do that. You can make a whole plan about how you're going to save up enough money, then quit your job, then move to LA, and try to become a screenwriter. Or you can spend 20 minutes today writing a screenplay and like then you are a screenwriter in some sense, not necessarily a commercially successful one yet, maybe not ever, but you've started doing the thing instead of plugging it into this whole plan about how you want your life to unfold, which has the effect of you not doing the activity. So, the challenge I would like to issue to you here, I think if you are watching this, there's a good chance that you are the kind of person who takes seriously the idea of building good habits, making changes to your life, transforming from a certain kind of person to a slightly different kind of person. And it's all very admirable, but here's a real challenge. Could you take one activity that you know you care about, but that you're not currently doing? Is there some fitness practice, some psychological meditative practice? Or is there some relationship that you know you want to be giving time to, that you're not giving time to? And could you actually, do that thing, that activity for let's say half an hour today? Or if you're watching this at the very end of the day, could you do it by the end of tomorrow? Could you actually do it? I don't mean do it as the first instance of a sequence of hundreds and hundreds of instances stretching off into the future. I don't mean begin a new habit. That's exactly the opposite of what I mean. I mean, just literally do that thing once, even in the knowledge that it might or might not be the start of a new habit. Because, of course, the irony is the only way to become the kind of person who does things regularly and has those kind of habits, is at some point to actually do the thing once and then to see later on if you're willing to actually do the thing once again and again and again. So, it's about giving up to return to the theme of this lesson, right? It's about giving up the control or the feeling of control that comes with, I have decided that every day for the next year or 10 years, I'm going to do X. It's giving up that control, and it's actually, entering into life by doing the thing, by going for the run. Even though you might not go for a run on any other day this week. By meditating for 10 minutes, even though you may not return to meditation for whoever who knows how long. There's a metaphor that I think is helpful here. When we're engaging in these fantasies of control, trying to make big plans for our life, trying to change the kind of person who we are, it's like we want to be the captain of a super yacht. It's like our lives are a super yacht on the river of time, and we want to be in control up on the bridge, making the plans, charting the course, and then heading directly to our destination. But real life is much more about launching yourself in a little canoe onto the white waters of time and just sort of seeing where it takes you and giving up control, but actually doing it. Actually, making contact with the water. Because the problem with the super yacht is that you keep postponing the start of the voyage. You never quite get around to it, or you call it off too easily when you think it's not gonna turn out perfectly. All we can ever do is make the next navigational alteration in the canoe and see where it takes us. So, I would urge you to embody that metaphor by finding one thing that you know would be a meaningful part of your life, but that you're not currently doing, and just do it once today, or at the latest tomorrow.