On the Value of Time

From a young age — having devoured motivational books about the “secrets of success” and every time-management manual I could find, and being restless by nature on top of that — I was always rushing somewhere.

I believed, and to a large extent still believe, that time is our most valuable asset. So I treated every minute with an almost fanatical pedantry. For most of the repeating little situations of daily life I’d worked out my own hacks for speeding up the routine: the optimal routes, how to behave at airports, in shops, in any public place.

But that strategy had a flip side: I started giving those procedures far too much weight. Anything that broke my perfectly choreographed script began to irritate me. Someone held me up by a few seconds at the jet bridge. Someone who had stood in line the whole time still hadn’t decided what they wanted — another couple of minutes gone. The taxi promised to arrive in three minutes, I was already outside, and it was still five minutes away. How dare you?! Naturally, all of this set off a strong, simmering irritation inside me.

But I started noticing something else, too. There I am — first at the baggage carousel, through faster than anyone, having “saved time” — and in the end I wait for my suitcase just like everyone else. What, in fact, did I change, apart from my own anxiety level?

How much will these “little wars” over minutes matter in a week, a month, a year?

Planning, distributing and delegating tasks well, from a place of inner calm, can save not minutes but days, months — maybe even years of your life. That’s where the focus is worth pointing.

A minute of even useless waiting in a good mood beats a saved minute lived in a hurry, in irritation, in the feeling of a pointless race.

As in other areas, the quality of the time we live is often more important than its quantity.

Here’s to valuing our time, thinking big, and knowing how to savour the moment — even standing in line. 😎