Are We There Yet? vol. 205
I was talking to a friend the other day about getting together at a specific time, and they told me that they didn’t have the time that week. We all spend a lot of time thinking about time. We spend time, we try to find time, we often don’t have time, we lose track of time, time flies by, we don’t know where the time goes, and sometimes we look back and determine that we wasted time.
In Oliver Burkeman’s book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, he discusses time a lot. In one chapter, he notes that our lives are basically a series of things to which we paid attention. When someone spends time paying attention to things that are truly unimportant to them, that is how I define wasting time. The biggest contributor to distraction these days is what Burkeman calls the attention economy, or what we know as social media, and our obsession to be online and connected at every moment of our lives. Of the attention economy, he says, “It’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about.”
As my good friend and colleague, Cathy Lee, has said, and I’m paraphrasing, it’s not that you don’t have the time for something; it’s that you are choosing to prioritize something else over whatever it is you could otherwise be doing. I’ve taken that statement to heart and try to think about whether or not a given task is actually meaningful and important to me and whether I should prioritize it ahead of other things. I’ve finally learned how to incrementally make better use of how I spend my days. It’s about time.
Take care and stay safe.
BOOK:
Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life by Dr. Mark Hyman
Aging has long been considered a normal process. We think disease, frailty, and gradual decline are inevitable parts of life. But they don’t have to be. Science today sees aging as a treatable disease. By addressing its root causes we can not only increase our health span and live longer but prevent and reverse the maladies of aging—including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia. In Young Forever, Dr. Mark Hyman challenges us to reimagine our biology, health, and the process of aging. To uncover the secrets to longevity, he explores the biological hallmarks of aging, their causes, and their consequences—then shows us how to overcome them with simple dietary, lifestyle, and emerging longevity strategies. You’ll learn:
- How to turn on your body’s key longevity switches
- How to reduce inflammation and support the health of your immune system
- How to exercise, sleep, and de-stress for healthy aging
- How to eat your way to a long life, featuring Dr. Hyman’s Pegan Diet
- Which supplements are right for you
- Where the research on aging is headed
- And much more