”Circumstances are never going to give you what you need. You’re going to have to take them. No one is going to give you time to study philosophy, you have to take it. You have to make the time. Externals are never going to restore what is essentially an internal issue. You need that break now…and you must get it by stepping away, not literally but figuratively. Stop fooling yourself. Stop expecting someone or someplace to restore you. The only person who can only do it is you. And the right time for it is not later, but now.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“The ‘if I had time’ lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and that writing happens a sentence at a time. Sentences can happen in a moment. Enough stolen moments, enough stolen sentences, and a novel is born — without the luxury of time.”
Julia Cameron, The Right To Write
“The time that you’re alive is the only thing you truly possess, and you can give it away. You can give it away by working for other people—they own your time and you can be miserable. You can give it away by reaching for external pleasures and distractions—spending the time that you have as a slave to different passions and different obsessions. Or you can make the time that you’re alive your own.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 426)
“One of the simplest ways to win is to always connect the small things you do to the larger thing you hope to accomplish. Five minutes can be spent working on something trivial or working on something life-changing. A brief session of work oriented toward a great cause is always time well spent. Most daily actions evaporate. Some accumulate.”
James Clear, Blog
“The problem isn’t that you’re too busy. You are too busy, but that’s not the problem. If you view being busy as the problem, there is no solution. You will always be too busy, and that will never change. As Andy Grove once noted: ‘A manager’s work is never done. There is always more to be done, more that should be done, always more than can be done.’ The problem is that you’re acting like a firefighter instead of a fire marshal.”
Ed Batista
“People can take away your possessions, but—short of murder—not even the most powerful aggressors can take time away from you unless you let them. Even in prison your time is your own, if you use it for your own purposes. To waste your time in battles not of your choosing is more than just a mistake, it is stupidity of the highest order.”
Robert Greene, The Daily Laws (Page 320)
“When people say ‘Do you have 5 minutes?’ I don’t think they’re cognizant of the 30+ minutes of context-switching I’d have to do for that 5 minutes.”
Sahil Lavingia, Twitter
“If you’re feeling creative, do the errands tomorrow. If you’re fit and healthy, take a day to go surfing. When inspiration strikes, write it down. The calendar belongs to everyone else. Their schedule isn’t your schedule unless it helps you get where you’re going.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“’How much could I lose?’ is not merely a financial question. If I make this choice: How much time could I lose? How much sanity could I lose? How much reputation could I lose? How much happiness could I lose? Opportunity cost is about a lot more than money.”
James Clear, Blog
“Anyone with a smartphone is familiar with the feeling of having somehow, as if by accident, lost a precious hour to their device. But thinking ill of that behavior only induces guilt and makes the problem worse. It creates a moral hierarchy that some actions are good, and some are bad. We have to realize that anything we want to do with our time is fine as long as we do it on our schedule.”
Nir Eyal