What Am I Doing With The Time I Have

I turned 35 two weeks ago, and one question has followed me around since. What am I doing with the time I have?

It is an odd question for me to be stuck on, because finding where the hours go is the thing I am best at.

Give me a process that eats someone's week and I know what to do with it. Map every step. Ask which steps actually need a person's judgment, and which ones a person is only doing because nobody ever stopped to ask. Remove what does not need to exist, automate what repeats, and the hours come back as a number you can check a month later. I like that work. I am good at it, and it still gives me a small jolt every time a week gets lighter for someone.

But I had never once run it on my own week.

Here is the easiest number I have. I drive about 10 hours a week, and for years I counted it as nothing. Not rest, not thinking time, just gone. Run it the way I would run any process: 10 hours x 52 weeks is 520 hours a year. That is thirteen full workweeks I had never written down.

I did eventually fix it, in my own way. I started using the drive to think out loud and capture ideas by voice, and most of those hours now produce something.

But look at what I actually did. I solved it as an efficiency problem, which is how I solve everything. The hours came back, slid into the rest of the week, and the week looked about the same as before. I had managed the time very well. I had never decided what it was for.

That gap is what this newsletter is about.

Everything else I manage comes with a balance I can check. Money has a statement. A project has a budget. Time has nothing. You know it runs out, and you never know how much is left. My father died suddenly in 2020, and I have not been able to pretend I can see that balance since. I call this the Law of Time: it is the only resource you know is finite and never know how much you have, and every decision spends from it whether anyone writes the cost down or not.

If you pick the right thing to get good at, a lot of other things get easier, and some of them stop mattering at all. So I made a choice. I picked time, because everything I care about runs on it. My work does. My health does. Being there for my family does.

None of this is about doing less. I want my work built well, and I want the rest of my week built with the same care: measured, chosen on purpose, with a plain answer to what the hours are for.

That is the experiment, and I am running it on my own week first. Every other Monday I will write down what I find, what I tried, and what the numbers said.

The Operator's Move

Open your calendar to last week. Not to fix anything. Just to look at what the week actually held.

Go slowly, and give every block one of three marks: chose it, needed it, or it just happened. Then add up the hours under each mark. Most people expect the last pile to be small. It usually is not.

Do not cancel or change anything yet. The only job this week is to see it, because you cannot engineer a week you have never looked at.

One Question

What did you spend last week on that you would not choose again?

If this reached you by email, hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Josh