Time Limited
Time Limited
Jonathan Clements | December 19, 2020
OUR MOST PRECIOUS resource is time. I’m determined to waste as little as possible.
Unless we’re at death’s door, none of us knows how much time we have, but we all know it’s limited. Yes, money is also limited—but, if we squander money, there’s always a chance we can make it back. Time lost, by contrast, is gone forever.
My preoccupation with time and its dwindling supply has grown as I’ve grown older. I may be patient with my investments, but I’m not patient with much else. After 58 years of trial and error, I know how I want to spend my days—and what miseries I want to avoid. That’s led me to adopt nine strategies:
1. Fix problems quickly. Faced with a distasteful task, I’m often tempted to put it off until next week or next month. This is foolish. The distasteful task—calling customer service, dealing with my tax return, cleaning out the basement—is going to cost me time, but now I’ve compounded that loss by spending unnecessary days contemplating the need to do it.
I’ve tried to break myself of this habit, with mixed results. What if I can’t handle a distasteful task right away? I’ll add it to my to-do list. If I do that, I find I don’t think about the task quite so much, plus writing it down removes some of the problem’s perceived burden, perhaps because I feel like I’m one step closer to getting it done.
2. Don’t stop halfway. This is another bad habit. I’ll often start on a project, but then switch to something else and come back to it later. This works well when writing—time away from the draft of an article allows me to look at it with fresh eyes—but it’s usually a time waster with other endeavors, because stopping and restarting chews up precious minutes.
3. Search less. Thanks to the internet, we can spend countless hours finding, say, the perfect toaster at the best possible price. But how about capping that search at 10 minutes? To save time, I’m inclined to check out a few options and then make a quick decision.
I realize that shopping brings great pleasure to some folks, in which case they should take all the time they want. Along those lines, I like pondering possible vacations, so I’m happy to spend an hour scouring the internet for information. But toasters? Not so much.
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