“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
“How much better this world would be if more of us would cultivate the sacred in our daily lives. Our busyness is often our enemy, making it hard for us to slow down long enough to breathe in the ethers of the spiritual planes.”
Marianne Williamson, The Shadow Effect (Page 155)
“As far as the writing itself is concerned it takes next to no time at all. Much too much is written every day of our lives. We are overwhelmed by it. But when at times we see through the welter of evasive or interested patter, when by chance we penetrate to some moving detail of a life, there is always time to bang out a few pages. The thing isn’t to find the time for it—we waste hours every day doing absolutely nothing at all—the difficulty is to catch the evasive life of the thing, to phrase the words in such a way that stereotype will yield a moment of insight. This is where the difficulty lies. We are lucky when that underground current can be tapped and the secret spring of all our lives will send up its pure water. It seldom happens. A thousand trivialities push themselves to the front, our lying habits of everyday speech and thought are foremost, telling us that that is what ‘they’ want to hear. Tell them something else.”
William Carlos Williams, via Sunbeams (Page 107)
“Saying no saves you time in the future. Saying yes costs you time in the future. No is like a time credit. You can spend that block of time in the future. Yes is like a time debt. You have to repay that commitment at some point. No is a decision. Yes is a responsibility.”
James Clear, Blog
“Your life is purchased by where you spend your attention.”
James Clear, Blog
“In order to say no with consistency and generosity, we need to have something to say ‘yes’ to.”
Justine Musk (writer), via The Practice (Page 58)
“The biggest fear most of us have with learning to say no is that we will miss an opportunity. An opportunity that would have catapulted us to success, or that will never come again. And most of the time, that simply isn’t true.
Grace Bonney, Saying “No”
I’ve found that the first part of learning to say no is learning to accept that offers and opportunities are merely an indication that you’re on the right path—not that you’ve arrived at a final destination you can never find again.
If someone is choosing you, it means you’re doing something right. And that is the biggest opportunity you can receive—the chance to recognize that your hard work is paying off. And if you continue to do good work, those opportunities will continue—and improve—over time.”
“If you put the jelly on before the peanut butter, the sandwich will fail. And if you try to spread the peanut butter on the plate and then add the bread, it will fail even worse. Like so many things, the order is not optional. And yet, we often do the least-scary or easiest parts first, regardless of what the order of operations tells us.”
Seth Godin, Blog
Ryan Holiday Quote on How Love Is Best Spelled T-I-M-E
“A French journalist once told me that love is best spelled T-I-M-E. I don’t think I’ve heard anything truer or more important in my role as a husband or father.”
Ryan Holiday, Medium
Beyond the Quote (Day 404)
Without T-I-M-E there can be no L-O-V-E. And while time isn’t the only thing needed for love to flourish, it is undoubtedly the universal preliminary requirement. It is only with the shared gift of time that all other actions, experiences, and conversations can take form. It is as though time is the bridge that connects the island of one person’s energy to another’s. And without that bridge, a person’s energy can only remain stranded and alone.
Read More »Ryan Holiday Quote on How Love Is Best Spelled T-I-M-ERyan Holiday Quote on Time Commitments and Learning To Say “No” To Wasteful Uses of Time
“One of the hardest things to do in life is to say ‘No.’ To invitations, to requests, to obligations, to the stuff that everyone else is doing. Even harder is saying no to certain time-consuming emotions: anger, excitement, distraction, obsession, lust. None of these impulses feels like a big deal by itself, but run amok, they become a commitment like anything else.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 11)
Beyond the Quote (Day 371)
How many time commitments do you have that you don’t even realize you have? I just recently started tracking my screen time on my iPhone and was shocked to see the results. Imagine if your mind had a “use-time” breakdown and showed you in a pie chart how much time you spent thinking about all of the things you think about every day. Would you be just as shocked as I was when I saw my screen time? I suspect even more so.
Read More »Ryan Holiday Quote on Time Commitments and Learning To Say “No” To Wasteful Uses of Time