Time as a Metric of life

Limited choices

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Friends,

Life is finite. You can not buy more time. So it’s what you do with your time that becomes important. How do you get more value from time? How do you get the most value out of your life? This is not an essay on longevity or healthspan. This is about how you can get more from your life.

It’s about choice and efficiency.

If you live to 80, you’ll live for nearly 1000 months. And let’s say as of today you are 40 years old. You have 500 months left left. A third of that will be on sleep. Maybe a quarter will be on cleaning, hygiene, eating. Maybe you have 250 months left. What will you do with that time?

Firstly you need to prioritise what it is you want - and then you can play the game of life. What’s your calling? Extracting the most value from time involves strategic planning and making conscious decisions that align what you want to do. Here’s are several strategies to maximise the effectiveness and value of time:

1. Use tools: Use tools like the Eisenhower Box to distinguish between tasks that are urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important. This helps you focus on what truly moves you forwards. It’s simple, but you need to be discretionary. Don’t do the first thing in your inbox. I have also found value in allocating specific blocks of time to different activities. This technique helps minimise transitions and interruptions, making you more productive and focused.

2. Set Clear Goals: Define short-term and long-term goals. Clear goals provide direction and help you allocate your time to activities that are most beneficial in achieving these objectives.

3. Use Technology Strategically: Leverage technology to automate routine tasks. Tools like scheduling apps, reminders, and automated software can save you time and reduce the mental load of remembering daily tasks. It’s why AI magical promise gives us an increased perceived value.

4. Delegate and Outsource: Decide what your own unique value is and identify tasks what others can do for you. Delegating work not only frees up your time but can also be more cost-effective, especially if the task is outside your area of expertise. This is the concept of the 4-hour work week by Tim Ferris.

5. Limit (Technology) Distractions: Minimise interruptions by setting boundaries around your work time. Techniques like turning off notifications or having designated "focus hours" can help you stay on task. Kill your social doom scroll. Does your feed bring value to life goal or calling? Does it add to your enjoyment goal? If not, kill it. The doom scroll is stealing your life away. Know it. Dino Ambrosi, in his TEDx talk, "The Battle for Your Time: Exposing the Costs of Social Media," highlights the significance of time management and the detrimental impact of excessive screen time on individuals. He emphasises the need to reevaluate the value of social media and its impact on mental health, cognition, and overall well-being, urging us to consider the true cost of investing time in digital platforms. What is the value that social media provides and what is the worth of your time spent on these platforms. What is the opportunity cost of losing an hour?

6. Continuous Learning: Invest time in acquiring new skills and knowledge. This investment enhances your capabilities and can open up new opportunities that increase your value over time. With education you can learn how to do things quicker or better - learning to do more in that time bucket than you could have done before. Life-long learning is not just about staying in the game - it’s about sucking the most value out of life.

7. Reflect and Refine: Regularly assess how you spend your time. Reflection allows you to notice patterns and make adjustments to your routines, improving efficiency and effectiveness. Ensuring adequate rest, exercise, and downtime is crucial. Well-rested and healthy individuals are more productive and creative, making better use of their working hours.

8. Invest in Relationships: Spend time building and maintaining professional and personal relationships. Strong networks can lead to new opportunities and collaborations that might not be accessible otherwise bringing alternative value to the minutes you have in this world. Another point that I encourage people to understand is using time as a currency. - how do you swap the value that you bring with someone else who might be able to provide you with something that is perceived as expensive to you?

If you were to invest your time (and think of it as money) you would review what activities are truly worth it.

You might also look at time “multipliers”. What could you do today that would make tomorrow better.

This approach aims to create more time for the future by giving emotional permission to spend time on activities that yield long-term benefits. Use strategies of "eliminate, automate, delegate, concentrate, and procrastinate on purpose" as ways to multiply time by making intentional decisions about when and how to address tasks.

The last thing I’ll say about time is patience. There is a difference between procrastination and purposeful delay, with the latter as a virtue that requires the patience to put off insignificant tasks.

And remember - busyness is not a proxy for your seriousness.

However you choose to spend your time, use it wisely. Once it is gone, it’s gone.

Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,

Rahim

Here are my recommendations for this week:

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Now

1. Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd says your dating ‘AI concierge’ will soon date hundreds of other people’s ‘concierges’ for you: Imagine this: you’ve “dated” 600 people in San Fransisco without having typed a word to any of them. Instead, a busy little bot has completed the mindless ‘getting-to-know-you’ chatter on your behalf, and has told you which people you should actually get off the couch to meet. So glad this is not my world!

2. The teens making friends with AI chatbots : Teens are opening up to AI chatbots as a way to explore friendship. But sometimes, the AI’s advice can go too far. Also: There's No Undoing Tech's Great Rewiring of Childhood and The End of Social Media: An Interview With Jack Dorsey

3. How to use cooking as a form of therapy: No matter your culinary skills, spend some reflective time in the kitchen to nourish and renew your sense of self Also: How Bad Are Ultraprocessed Foods, Really? and McDonald's and other food giants are struggling in the inflation economy

4. What's Education 4.0 - and how do we get there? Successfully integrating AI into education requires thoughtful strategy and implementation, aiming to augment teacher roles, integrate AI into curricula, and personalise the educational journey, equipping students with the necessary skills for the future.

5. Best Books Since 2000: Looking for your next great read for Summer? NYT's new tool gives you 3,228 to filter.

Next

1. Lifelike robot invasion: Inside China’s insane humanoid factory: EX Robots specializes in crafting realistic humanoids designed for interaction with people and fulfilling public service duties.

2. New AI generates CRISPR proteins unlike any seen in nature: Profluent’s new platform is like ChatGPT for genetic technology. Related: Google DeepMind’s new AI can model DNA, RNA, and ‘all life’s molecules’

3. Google helped make an exquisitely detailed map of a tiny piece of the human brain

   A small brain sample was sliced into 5,000 pieces, and machine learning helped stitch it back together.

4. UK AI startup Wayve wins $1bn funding for self-driving car software: If you can drive in London, you can probably drive anywhere (see the video)

5. I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked: A trip to the Beijing Auto Show reveals just how advanced China's EVs are. So what are the so-called "foreign" automakers doing about it?

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