Who's Time Is It Anyway?
October 23rd, 2022
Happy Sunday Friends!
Here is your Sunday Musings, a quick dose of what I’m exploring and thinking about. If you’re enjoying or finding the musings useful, please feel free to forward this along to friends.
It's been a pretty interesting week for me. I’m in competition for a new key position, negotiating investment options and technical development for the startup I’m working with a couple close friends, prepped a senior executive presentation about a major program I’m in charge of, and I’m building the transition plan for my replacement.
With all this going on, I've allowed various other things to pile up - life administrata, the YouTube channel startups, PhD research, I had a birthday in there somewhere, messages from people etc, etc. In the past, I would have been tempted to tell myself that "I didn't have time" which is why these things piled up.
Over the last few years, I've been eliminating that excuse from my lexicon, framing a perspective in a more useful way.
We have the same daily 24 hours. Breaking that down, 8 for sleep (hopefully), 10 at work (for me), that leaves 6 hours all the other things we want to do (and even more on weekends and vacation). Factoring family dinner, family time, and extracurricular activities, we still have quite a bit of free time.
What we do with that time is our choice. I have a poor opinion on “I don't have time”. I think it encourages a belief that time is outside our control. By saying I don't have time, we are giving our personal choices away. We all have time on our hands, it’s how we choose to spend it that is within our control. Marcus Aurelius’ rule was to blame yourself or blame no one. Thinking I am choosing, what I do and do not to make time for, puts the responsibility on our shoulders and lets us get back to accomplishing our priorities.
So how do I have the time to supposedly do stuff? Firstly, I think of my time as something in my control. Whatever I do is what I choose to do.
So, this past week, it wasn’t that I didn't have the time to reply to messages or keep on top of the other things. It's that I've prioritized other things above those. And that's ok (and apologies to anyone who is waiting on a response from me!).
I've developed a few time management tips/hacks that will be the subject of a YouTube video at some point.
The takeaway? Next time we think 'I want to do this, but I don't have the time', we can remind ourselves that how we spend our time is in our control. Consider changing your perspective to 'I am choosing to prioritize other things over this'. We might find that time disappears from our internal list-of-excuses that prevents us from doing worthwhile things.
What are your thoughts? Just send a tweet to @erichaupt on Twitter and put #SundayMusings at the end so I can find it. Or eric@erichaupt.com for long form email.
What I’m Reading Watching This Week
Learning How to Learn, by Barbara Oakley
Ms. Oakley started off failing her way through grade school, joined the Army, became a Russian linguist, and then a professor of Engineering. She taught herself how to learn after realizing how much she had limited herself.
She talks about overcoming procrastination, gives some great guidelines on learning and how to reenforce learning, talks about the importance of giving oneself time, and the importance of utilizing recall and studying WITH people. This, to me sounds a lot like spaced repetition, and teach back.
If you liked her talk, Ms. Oakley has a free course on Coursera here.
Have you read it? Send me a message with what you think! @erichaupt on Twitter or eric@erichaupt.com
Technology I’m Looking at
Notion
I’ve been testing out Notion, Mem, Obsidian, and RemNote for a couple months now. They’re all GREAT! I love the idea of using AI to tag and organize notes in Mem, I love the mind mapping and tagging in Obsidian, and I love the focused studying concepts with spaced repetition in RemNote. So, what does that mean? It means I’ve chosen Notion, of course!
Why did I choose Notion? Great question! Notion gives me the lowest bar, both monetarily and learning, to entry. I have created my first few databases and a Zettlekasten. It lets me take notes and conduct my research the way that works for me and also lets me build out templates that I’ll share for researching, book summaries and tracking, as well as task management. There are a dizzying array of great options, this one just seems to work for me.
side note: I’m building out the mentoring/cyber leadership syllabus in notion, complete with a Kanban-style card section for tracking progress; I’ll share it when I’m done!
Quote I’m Musing
“People are frugal guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy”
-Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
As I look at my twins, I have begun to think a lot on time. I catch myself agonizing over the best way to save a couple bucks by finding a coupon code, or find a sale for something I need frequently. However, I never used to think about the cost of spending time to save money. I can make more money, but I can’t make more time to spend with my family, or my friends. Maybe it’s worth losing an extra $20 bucks to save me a couple hours, or a few hundred dollars to save me days. I doubt I’ll look back and think that I should have spent more time making money.
I would love your feedback!
Which musing is your favorite? What else do you want to see or what should I eliminate? Any other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @erichaupt on Twitter and put #SundayMusings at the end so I can find it. Or, eric@erichaupt.com for long form email. Like what I do? Consider forwarding to a friend!
Have a wonderful week, I’ll see you Sunday.
-e
