On our ‘Engaging People, Powering Companies’ podcast last week,

Amrit spoke on the topic of time and urgency, and he didn’t just record the audio! For the first time ever, you can watch him speak, as he recorded it on YouTube! Back to this week’s topic then – it was inspired by the ‘Nudgestock Festival’, an event we both attended, and one that Amrit has attended for the last few years because of its richness of information in the field of Behavioural Science, hosted by Ogilvy.

This year’s theme really did focus our attention. It was a sobering and thought-provoking topic, and that topic was ‘Time’. Rory Sutherland opened the festival with his take on time and what we could look forward to throughout the day, and one of his opening statements was we have four thousand weeks over a lifetime, two of which we spend crying! I can’t remember how many he said we spent in a supermarket! I have lived two thousand, four hundred and four of my (hopefully) four thousand weeks. I have one thousand five hundred and ninety-five left.

These insights are Oliver Burkeman’s, author of ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ who took to the stage. Four thousand weeks is how long we get to spend expressing this human condition and, the majority of this time seems to be filled by feeling like we don’t have enough time, have too much to do, or that it is out of our control. He spoke about how the reward for being successful, is that we just get busier. The person who responds to every email in a timely fashion for example, doesn’t ever get to the end of said emails, in fact they get more emails because they are so efficient and one leads to another, as well as a reputation for getting back to people! Rory joked that the best way to save time is not respond to emails at all!

Burkeman referenced a book called ‘More Work for Mother’ by Ruth Cowan which talks about how the revolutionary development of gadgets such as washing machines and hoovers, at first seemed to offer better standards of ease and comfort in the home, but actually replaced jobs that might once have been done by men, children and servants, as well as women, all sharing the load, but that ended up raising the cleanliness standards, of which women became solely responsible for, and have spent a lifetime trying to keep up with! It stole time rather than giving comfort and ease.

And this is the point really. Our time gets taken, used up and is rarely ours to do with what we will. Sometimes consciously and sometimes not. Rory Sutherland referenced the fact that often optimisation trumps human preference. In efforts to save time, we are given the shortest routes when booking train tickets, not the cheapest or most scenic, or when consulting Google Maps in our travels. We want to be spending the limited time we have here on earth making the absolute most. We want to choose how best to spend our precious time. Why then do we spend such little time considering how to make the most of it, and instead are run ragged by the society in which we live, leading to that feeling of unfulfillment. Of never being done.

We have this tendency to spend our lives focusing on things that we need to just get out the way. When we have got through them maybe we can spend time focussing on those things we dream about and long for. We are not focussing on the right things. Burkeman called this ‘joyless urgency’. We are spending our lives in joyless urgency. How miserable. In the podcast Amrit talks about the Eisenhower Matrix, where we spend a lot of time doing the important and urgent tasks (firefighting), but these leave little to no room, for doing what might fall into the important quadrant. What is important to you? What are we putting off, in the delusion that one day we will move all the joyless yet urgent tasks to the done pile, and have space for what is important?

Burkeman’s take is, guess what – they never get done! We will die with a to-do list. Instead, he says, this is it. These days are our days to be doing what we want with. Pay yourself first, in time, ahead of the endless, joyless to-dos. Accept the defeat of not ever being able to complete all these tasks that steal our time. Accept it and feel empowered. If we can’t get to the end anyway, then we can relax. We can choose another way, one that sustains and excites us, rather than depletes and exhausts us.

If we can face into the reality that our lifetime is finite, and that it just isn’t natural to rush through life on things we are just trying to get out the way. In understanding this, and knowing we won’t have time to do everything we want to do, or that others want us to do, maybe we can stop beating ourselves up for failing. And if we aren’t beating ourselves up, but instead get a kick out of ticking things off, let’s be damn sure they are things that at the end of our lives we are very happy we ticked off!

An activity worth spending time on, and over and over again, is to decide how you want to spend your time. What do you value? What do you want to be able to look back and say, I did that? Prioritise these things ruthlessly! Know that when this is decided on, we will say no to things and be okay with that, because we just can’t do everything. What we want to do, is spend time on the things that help us find peace and fulfilment in our lives. When we are clear on these things, life might just feel like it slows down a notch, in a way that feels like we are making the most of our four thousand weeks! Or those we have left at least!

Click here to listen to the podcast.