[Lifehacking] Time. And How to use it well during your limited lifetime.

Lucius Seneca was a famous Roman statesman and philosopher, known for his serious studies and thinking about time.

“If we are to live well, we have to be constant students of the greatest subject of all: life itself”

In his essays, Seneca offers us an urgent reminder of the non-renewability of our most precious resource: our lifetime.

So let’s have a look at few times of time management provided by our old friend Seneca.

1. Treat time as a commodity:

Seneca says, “People are frugal in garding their personal property, but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing which is right to be stingy.”

Seneca caution that we fail to treat time as a valuable resource, even tho this is arguably our most precious and least renewable one.

Imagine walking down the stream and watching a really rich guy throwing his money away.

You definitely think that person was insane. And yet we see others and ourselves throwing something far more valuable every day: our time. The amount we get is uncertain but surely limited.

It is clearly more insane to waste time than money because we can’t make anymore time when it runs out.

To realize the value of 1 year, ask a student who failed a grade

To realize the value of 1 month, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby

To realize the value of 1 week, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper.

To realize the value of 1 hour, ask the person who just missed the train.

To realize the value of 1 second, ask the person who nearly avoided an accident.

To realize the value of 1 millisecond, ask the person who got silver at the olympics.

While the amount of time we get on this earth is uncertained, the one thing that is certain is that this time is limited.

Money and property can increase and decrease depending on our luck and efforts, but our time is fixed.

Death crisps ups on time wasters, people who assume time is cheap because when spent properly, time become an ampilfier. When spent without consideration, it becomes a consistent source of regrets.

2. 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 was his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow.”

We are all guilty of spending too much of our time preparing for life.

Seneca pushes us to live right now. To not delay our happiness. To not thing that happiness lie in the future. He criticize those who think they can work diligently until around age 60 when they finally retire and can be happy.

Our future is uncertain and is not in your control. The life in the future you are working towards may never come. We are so busy about the future that we often let the present slip away allowing time to rush on unobserved and unceased.

And then when we are old and on our death beds, we finally realize how short and valuable how our life is, left with regrets ion not making the most of it when we could.

Seneca compares time to a rushing stream that not always flow.

If you are in the middle of the desert and you come across a stream of water, but you are 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 30,40,50s are all worth planning but don’t allow them to take away the precious present.

You can only live one moment at the time, and you can only live it once, so choose to live in the moment.

3. Live life for your own self.

“So you must not think a man have live long because he have long hair and winkles. He has not lived long, he just existed long.”

We all have certain things that we want in our lives, being a dream house, a dream job, a dream relationship or a dream vacation. But many of us are not getting even close to these dream because we get stuck with a job we can’t stand to pay the bills or getting stuck with people we dont love because we are scared to be alone.

You are just being toasted and turned around y things coming at you. And in today world of information you are getting tons of stuff coming at you.

We then fool ourselves by telling us we dont have enough time to try new pursue. We are “so busy”.

But being busy is always YOUR choice. Being busy with things you dont like is the greatest distraction from living.

We routinely go through our lives day after days, showing up for obligations that are being absent from ourselves.

The best way you can invest your time is by investing in creating a life you love living.

If you dont 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?

If I can change something about my life or about me, what would it be?

You might realize you want to change your job or your city or pursue a new hobby.

You can start by waking up early and use that extra time to do things that you love.

Time is precious and its taking away for all of us. The longer you want to start making changes, the longer you will spend your life working to make someone else dream reality.

4-Practice Pre-medidato malorum.

We learn from Seneca, “while wasting our time procrastinating and hesitating, life goes on.”

Procrastination occurs when a conflict between short term gratification of impulses like — to do nothing and waste time — and long term commitments like making a sales report.

In psychology, this is called “time inconsistency”.

Even tho doing meaningful work over the course of years is more important for most of us than lounging around, the human bean have a very dated bias towards what is here and now.

However Seneca give us a way to fight this with a very effective and simple method: the stoics call it premeditato malorum.

The idea about this is to ask yourself before doing something about what can go wrong.

It is a form of negative visualization where once you have identify the distractions or problems you could face, you can actually design around them with preparation.

By acknowledging distractions before hands and then in response setting suitable time for it, you can bypass the impact of short term impulses ahead of time.

Part 2 coming soon…Waiting for it you can listen to this — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlMWSAcQce4