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Would you rather be your current age with your current life, or a billionaire with only a year left to live?
I can’t ever imagine choosing the money unless my life was miserable and full of suffering.
My point goes to show how valuable our time is to us. In fact, it always has been.
Money is nice, but I’d rather have decades of ordinary happiness over any amount of money.
Why then do we treat our time (and mental health) with such trivial disregard?
We value our days, but we live as if they’ll go on forever and we have plenty to spare.
This isn’t a post about productivity and trying to get more done. There are many ways to “waste” your time, and one of them is to be really efficient at pursuing dreams you don’t really value.
What I’d like to see is more people caring less about the world in general, and more about their own lives and the lives of those they intersect with.
That starts with not wasting your time and happiness like you’re the owner of a humvee when gas prices are cheap.
Every now and then I like to take stock of my own time usage, and see where I’m letting that precious gift slip through the cracks.
What follows are 9 ways I’ve squandered the limited hours of my life.
I can’t get them back, but I can swallow that bitter pill and let it heighten my appreciation for every day that remains.
Letting your mind race with worry about things you can’t control.
One of the things that makes us uniquely human is our ability to think about the future.
Unfortunately, not everyone has taken the time to harness that power, and so it sometimes gets going in all sorts of unhelpful directions.
Learning to have more control over my thoughts, didn’t come naturally to me. I’m prone to an active mind that has a life of its own.
For a long time I tried to fight it head on, by willing myself to think different thoughts.
But now I know I’m more like a toddler who needs to be distracted with something different. Physical exercise, breathing techniques, and cold showers work best.
Overthinking every decision to the point of exhaustion.
I’m going to be real with you here— overthinking has been and continues to be my greatest struggle.
Oh, the many hours I long to have back that I spent thinking myself in circles!
I used to believe if I just thought long and hard enough, I’d find a solution to every problem.
Now, I just try to move fast and figure things out as I go. I find it energizing in an adventurous sort of way.
Allowing regrets to eat away at your present happiness.
Speaking to the point above, I used to kick myself for all the time I had wasted being indecisive.
I wish I hadn’t gone through that long and painful season of life.
The longer I wanted to make a decision, the less confident I grew, and the more I retreated to my “thinking”. A classic downward spiral.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
We can choose to focus our attention on the present moment and the decisions we’re making today.
That is a recipe for happiness that works for me.
Waiting for the “perfect” time to get started.
Very little of the waiting I’ve done in my life has been productive.
It didn’t make the decision any easier. It didn’t help me grow more confident. And it didn’t get me any closer to my goals.
Unless you are convinced that waiting is the right choice, it’s probably safe to assume it’s the wrong one.
Status quo bias keeps most of us from making changes, even when they would be beneficial.
The waiting drains you of your life force in ways that are hard to recover from.
Just get started.
Chasing things you don’t actually want.
One of the reasons I had to stop using social media was because it filled my head with too many things I thought I wanted.
My brain was incapable of simply appreciating another person doing something cool without demanding that I had it too.
A lot of my initial career frustration grew out of this mode of thinking.
I never stopped to think about what I actually wanted out of life, because I was too busy window-shopping all the options that other people had chosen.
That’s one of the hard parts about life in the internet-age.
We’re exposed to an order of magnitude more ideas, but we’re still limited by our own human limits.
Don’t waste your life chasing other people’s dreams. Actually stop and think about what you want and stay on that path.
Avoiding things that need to be done.
When I’m procrastinating, I become the worst version of myself.
I’m unproductive and unmotivated, of course. But along with that, I’m not even able to enjoy my laziness because of the guilt.
What an irrational way to fritter away my days.
The antidote is to be decisive: push hard in the very opposite direction of your avoidance. Rip the bandaid off, and do the task.
It’s not nearly as bad once you get started, and you’ll instantly feel as if a huge weight was lifted off your shoulders.
Impulsively checking and scrolling on your phone.
Doing things because you “should”.
I have a philosophy that we ought never do things because we “should”.
As in, I really don’t want to do this, but I “should”.
If it’s an obligation or a commitment you’ve made, there’s no choice in the matter. There is no “should” in this scenario, only the highest duty to keep your word and do the right thing.
And if it’s something you want to do, then why delay another minute. Are you trying to save all the fun for your old age?
Eliminating the “shoulds” means you can cut out all the stuff you do just to keep up appearances, or because everyone else does.
It means getting back your time for what matters most.
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