You Have More Time Than You Think

To kick things off I wanted to discuss at just a high level the concept of working remote and some of the obvious benefits as well as some not so obvious. 

About 6 months ago I was talking to a young designer and they mentioned how it was impossible to get everything done in a day. Once work has been completed how on earth does anyone have time for cleaning the house, making a healthy meal, etc...This was a young man, early 20s, single with a full time design job. He was most definitely good at his craft, skilled and a pretty smart person. 

This is a typical quandary for a lot of folks and something I find fascinating. I immediately started doing the math in my head and realized every week we have 168 hours at our disposal, no more, no less and this is the case for every single person on the planet. Time is immutable, you cannot change it, you cannot save it, you cannot stop it. We are going to be hurdled forward through space and time at a constant rate every single week. So what are we left with? 168 hours. 

The 168 hour concept sparked an interest in me and I did a little bit of leg work. There is of course a book on the subject - https://lauravanderkam.com/books/168-hours -  and a handful of websites and articles but it was not something omnipresent in the productivity world like journaling, todo apps and waking up at 5 AM, more on this later. 

I started to break it down and obsess over the concept a bit. I enjoy chunking things out, schedules, checklists and goal breakdowns. There are 2 very typical numbers we are quoted for tasks that take up a portion of our daily lives, sleep and work.

• Work 40 hours per week

• Sleep 8 hours a night

If we extrapolate the sleep schedule to a week, we are sleeping 56 hours per week. So now we have 56 hours of sleep that we must get as well as 40 hours of work that we must...do. 96 hours a week for just these two items is a lot but we are still left with 72 hours a week. That is 43% of our week that we still have to live, relax, make an impact and do something meaningful. 

I want to stop here and make a quick point that the 56 hours per week of sleep is a non-negotiable and I would highly recommend you read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker - https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Why-We-Sleep - a Bill Gates favorite. When I say sleep is a non-negotiable, I am putting sleep into a bucket of life concepts that should not be allowed to be tampered with. Each of us should have our own non-negotiable list, more on this later, but sleep should absolutely be on everyone’s list and unfortunately we live in a society where lack of sleep is celebrated as some sort of badge of power. I will have an entire show about the concept of non-negotiables as well as sleep. 

So if we assume 56 hours of our 168 hour week is used for sleep we still have 112 hours of our lives left. Many would argue that work is also non-negotiable and I would agree but probably for very different reasons. As I said before, I like to bucket the chunks of my life into 3 areas really. 

• Health

• Contribution

• Fulfillment

These areas are not mutually exclusive and almost every decision you make should tick the box on each of these in order to live your best life. Work can add to your health, it can very directly be your contribution and should lend itself to your personal fulfillment. If your work is not doing these things, you should ask yourself why. I did this very thing almost a year ago and it has been a journey and why I am here today discussing the topic. 

So, with work and sleep we have 72 hours left in our week. For most of us, those 72 extra hours are not spread evenly throughout the week based on the fact that we are beholden to a schedule as part of our contribution (work). If we sleep 8 hours a day and work 8 hours a day, we are left with 8 hours a day for everything else during the week and 16 hours a day on the weekend. That is actually quite a lot of time, so when asked “how do you have time to prepare healthy meals, clean the house, be organized, have a side project, etc...” I inevitably think of these concepts.  

The point here is intentionality. If you have 8 hours in your day to do all the things you feel you want to do or need to do, you need to be intentional about it. Now, there are some things to account for that are very typical for a lot of us. 

• Eat

• Exercise

• Commute

• Relax / Decompress

• Socialize

• Chores

As a father, I would put what most people consider “childcare” into 3 of these buckets, relax, socialize and chores. I wanted to point out a big one for a lot of people though and that is the commute. Living in any decent size city means that for a lot of people the commute is 30 minutes or more. If we add the concept of getting ready for work and getting out of work mode once home, we add at least another 30 minutes each way. We have just removed 2 hours from the 8 hour bucket. Imagine what you could be doing with those 2 hours that lends to health, contribution or fulfillment. 

I am a Founder and CEO of a company and when I truly realized how much was being sucked away from our employees as well as myself, I made a change. If I could give an average of 10 hours per week back to my employees and myself why would I not make that change? There are plethora of reasons that working together as a group has its benefits but none of them outweigh time. As I have said, time is something you cannot get back, you cannot bank it for later, you cannot pause it and once it is gone you can never get it back. 

This concept was so important to me and has made such an impact on my life and the lives of those around me that I was inspired to begin this series. I have more time for personal fulfillment, to focus on my health and mindfulness and the contributions that I want to make whether for my work, my family or my community. This series will continue to delve into the concepts of remote work, the 168 hour week, productivity, wellness and finding the best ways to improve your life as well as the lives around you.