700,000 Hours: The Only Thing We Have

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 45 seconds

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700,000 hours - what are you gonna do with them?

Let's do some math. 80 * 365 * 24 = 700,800. Cool - anyone can do that. Thanks for reading!

Or wait. What did we just calculate there? I was wondering how many hours my life would actually last. Assuming I'll live until I am 80 (which considering my current lifestyle isn't necessarily a given), there is a total of 700,000 hours in my life - 210,000 of which I've spent already. Is that a lot? I have no idea. I simply cannot relate to such a large number in the context of hours. There's only one thing I know: once the current hour is gone, it'll never come back. Ever. 

Time is our most valuable resource, nevertheless we disrespect it in an almost frivolous manner. How often does the day just pass by without really having achieved anything? To me, that happens a lot. Tic Tac. Another day gone. And while we tend to think we have plenty more of them, they'll pass by sooner than we can even fathom. 

Idleness

Fairly easy to stay idle here though ...

This post was inspired by the idleness I've observed here in the Dominican Republic. Monday, around 11 am. I'm walking down to the beach and there are people sitting everywhere. Hey - it's awesome that you can do that, but ... is this really where you want to be? I've talked to plenty of these people just hanging around and if they were happy where they currently are. 100% of them said no (sample size 12). That made me think - you're telling me you're not happy in your current situation, yet you're just sitting around doing nothing? Something's wrong here. And I'd like to find out what it is. 

We all know the old adage: "time is money", or in more mathematical terms, "time equals money". Following that logic, it'd be perfectly rational to put the exact same value on both time and money. Therefore, if we value one hour of our time at 50 €, then it'd be perfectly rational to flush at least 100 € down the toilet every day. Would you ever do that? I highly doubt it (unless you're some filthy rich masochist, but then it'd be better invested just giving it to me). However, we all do this every day: check some Facebook here, some Instagram there, wait for the bus for 15 minutes, sitting around idle because we don't know what to do with ourselves. In my opinion, that is borderline criminal. The same is true for the people in the Dominican Republic: in the previous logic, they're constantly throwing money into the Atlantic Ocean. And that just cannot happen. 

"But Dominik, I have a job, I do sports, I live a great life, I'm not one of them." Right. And you never "have time" (aside: this phrase is my personal arch enemy). That's okay if you're happy with what you're doing, because you've got your prioties straight. Most of us however haven't. "I'd like to read more", "I'd like to speak another language", "I really want to spend more time with my girlfriend". Cool - so why don't you do it? "But .. when?" 

Glad you asked. 

I'd like to present a few activities that you can leverage and techniques that will help you free up more time for the things that really matter to you. I'm also most focusing on the things happening outside of your professional life (although some of the below points can also be applied to life inside the office). Let's get into them:

5 ways to get more out of your time

1. Leverage your commute

As normal human beings in our society, chances are that we're not working from home but instead have to go to our job or our university. For instance, it takes me around 15 minutes to get from my home to the office. Now, there are several ways that I could get there. I could either take a bus or use my bicycle. The former is convenient, but the latter is a lot faster and allows me to work on my cardio every day - something that I normally do when absolutely necessary (I prefer lifting weights) and probably would not make time for outside of it. While commuting (I have a route without a lot of traffic), I listen to audiobooks or podcasts. 15 minutes isn't a lot of time though - or is it? Here are some number acrobatics: 15 minutes * 2 (because I also have to go back home) * 5 (5 workdays a week) * 4 (4 weeks in a month) = 10 hours of time spent commuting every month. 

To put this into relation: this is the time it roughly takes to listen to two average audiobooks on 1.25 listening speed. In other words: I get to read two books every month and have amazing cardio simply due to leveraging my commute. This adds up to an additional 24 books a year - on top of the time that I dedicate to reading anyway. That's a ton of books, more than I've probably read during my studies. Just imagine what you could do with all that information. It'd be insane. If you want to start doing that, podcasts on Spotify and an Audible subscription are good places to start. The apps are incredibly easy to use and in no time, you'll be listening to a lot of cool shit.

Because I really want to hammer this point home, do the same equation again but this time, you have a 60 minute one-way commute. This adds up to 40 hours every month - or, roughly, 11.3 % of your awake time (assuming you sleep 8 hours every day). Shit. That's A LOT of time - and it'll be gone forever. You better use it. 

Personally, I always tend to pay a premium for location. A long commute to work simply isn't worth paying $200 less in rent every month, as I just demonstrated. So if you're stuck in a situation like that, you might wanna think long and hard about moving closer to your workplace. 

2. Leverage other activities

In order to not let this go unmentioned, you can apply this principle to any activity that does not require your full attention. I like to call my parents and grandparents while I'm cleaning or washing dishes, for instance. Household activities are things that I absolutely despise, but by calling the family, they become a lot more enjoyable. Grandma is happy and so are the flatmates. Same goes for the gym: you have plenty of time between sets (if you train like me at least), so listening to a podcast while working out works pretty well. 

3. Outsource things that you dislike doing or aren't very good at 

Speaking of household activities, we really need to get a cleaning lady. Why? Back to "time equals money". I value my time at around 50 € per hour (if you want to get into the nitty-gritty economics with perfect substitution and all that, feel free to message me). Therefore, if it takes me two hours to clean the apartment and I can get the job done for less than $100, I shouldn't do it myself. I can get a cleaning lady for this purpose for around 40 € in Germany (not to mention that she probably does a lot better job than I do. Just ask my flatmates.). Why should I do it myself? I don't enjoy it, and it's not worth my time. Therefore, the only rational solution is to outsource it. 
Side note: This, of course, changes a lot if you enjoy cleaning. Then, it's absolutely worth your time! 

4. Eliminate time consumers

Breaking news: social networks eat up a lot of time. Nowadays, I believe we're all aware of this - but we don't act upon it (myself included). I still spend plenty of time every day looking at my Instagram feed, checking Facebook and WhatsApp messages and whatnot. Now that my phone has been stolen, I don't feel the urge to do that at all - I'm really not missing anything (or have you ever felt like you REALLY REALLY had to check Instagram?). Now, the easiest way out would be to simply not have an account there; which is easy to say, but hard to impossible to actually put into practice. Facebook has been a blessing in managing my whole network, and I wouldn't wanna miss it for the world. 

You can, however, eliminate the most time-consuming part of it: the newsfeed. There is an amazing browser extension called "Facebook Newsfeed Eradicator", which simply blocks your newsfeed and instead gives you a smart quote from somebody. I regularly catch myself going to facebook.com, just to realize that there's nothing going on there. I highly recommend installing it. On the phone, just use the messenger app; not the Facebook app. The same is true for Instagram and others: switch off the notifications and all the sudden, you won't even know what to do with all your time anymore. 

5. Stop binge watching Netflix

"But I love Game of Thrones!" Absolutely - and that's awesome! The beauty and ugliness of TV series is that it's just so easy to watch another one; it's so smooth and shallowly rewarding. And all the sudden, you've spent 6 hours in front of the TV without actually having achieved anything. I personally don't watch TV series (when I tell people about that, sometimes they tend to look at me like I just told them that I'm Amish and have never used a car before), because I prefer to do other activities that I find more rewarding. This is completely up to you - but I want you to be aware of how big of a time sink Netflix and TV is. 

A note on idleness: one question that certainly came up while reading this post was - isn't it good to sit back and relax every now and then? Yes. It isn't just good, but it's absolutely necessary. And I'm not very good at it, as many of you know. However, I believe that you'll know when you have to take that time. After a long workday, I sometimes cherish the ride home without having any input, or sitting on the roof doing nothing for 30 minutes. It's part of human life and we should not forget to take our downtime every now and then. What's important to me is to consciously take that downtime - and not just "letting it happen to you". As I've stated previously, control over our lives is one key factor of happiness - and that also includes controlling your idle and non-idle time. 

Side note: I hesitated publishing this post for a while because I started thinking more and more about the topic of conscious idleness. To me, one metric to tell if someone is successful is if they can spend 30 minutes just doing nothing. That's a pretty amazing feat - one that I haven't accomplished yet. Idleness has its time and place. But it shouldn't be the activity that takes up a huge chunk of your time. Maybe I will look at this completely differently one year from now - I don't know. As of right now, that's my point of view and I'd love your thoughts on it. 

Closing

During the past couple of years, I've gotten the feedback every now and then that I'm very mature and reflected for my age. That makes me feel warm and fuzzy, and it'd be easy for me to say that I'm just super awesome and mature and everything. However, I don't think that that's my personality - it simply is the result of good habits, and especially of reading a lot. Reading is one of the things that I the most on a regular basis, and it has greatly expanded my view on the world as well as on myself. Just think about it: an author (presumably) only writes about things that he has understood at a transcendent level; therefore, he probably put in 10,000+ hours of his time into that topic (or 1.428% of his total time alive). When you read his or her book, you can acquire that knowledge (to a certain degree, of course), within 5-10 hours. That's very accelerated learning and one reason why the invention of printing has advanved our society so far. Use reading as a mean to leverage your time in order to acquire great deals of knowledge and perspectives. It won't hurt you, but instead turn you into a well-rounded human being. Chances are that if you're reading this blog, you're already on a good way - keep going! 

Am I holier than thou? Absolutely fucking not. Like most humans, I'm notoriously bad at taking my own advice and spend plenty of time pondering about irrelevant decisions, sending stupid snapchats to my friends and doing things that I really shouldn't be doing. I have plenty of room for improvement. 

Yet in the end, it comes down to what we want to achieve with our 700,000 hours. And I certainly don't want to be the guy whose tombstone says: "he lived a great life, filled with social media, doing unenjoyable things and spending more than 10% of his awake time going somewhere". Do you?

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Discipline Equals Freedom

Tattoos have always fascinated me. But getting one myself? Never. Because in the end, you're stuck with whatever stupid shit you were so convinced about in your youth. To me, in order to have a tattoo, you'd first have to find something so true, so unchangeable, that you want to have it with you for the rest of your life. But recently, I am starting to become more and more convinced that I might have found such a life-defining phrase that will always hold true. It reads: Discipline equals freedom. 

Some of you may recognize this phrase. I haven't coined it myself, but it is straight up taken from a former Navy Seal Commander named Jocko Willink (listen to the interview with him here - can definitely recommend). However, I would like to add my own thoughts to this short phrase - because in my opinion, it holds a very important truth for living a happy life. First of all, let's get a short summary taken from Tim Ferriss' Book "Tools of Titans" (emphasis mine):

I interpret this to mean, among other things, that you can use positive constraints to increase perceived free will and results. Freeform days might seem idyllic, but they are paralyzing due to continual paradox of choice (e.g., “What should I do now?”) and decision fatigue (e.g., “What should I have for breakfast?”). In contrast, something as simple as pre-scheduled workouts acts as scaffolding around which you can more effectively plan and execute your day. This gives you a greater sense of agency and feeling of freedom. Jocko adds, “It also means that if you want freedom in life—be that financial freedom, more free time, or even freedom from sickness and poor health—you can only achieve these things through discipline.”

I've written plentiful about the paradox of choice and decision fatigue (on which you can read up here). The inspiration for this post comes from a very real situation: I've been traveling for the past two weeks in the Dominican Republic and due to not having any plans, but simply living the day as it comes, I've felt very tired at times. Tired of making decisions. Tired, because I couldn't even get the most basic things in (such as exercise, 5-Minute-Journal and meditation). Despite the fact that these only take a combined 15-20 minutes - so there should be plenty of time in a day where you technically have "nothing" to do. Why is that? I didn't plan for it. I didn't have the discipline to do it every day, and that caused me lots of time "wasted" by thinking about what to do next. Everything was optional all the sudden, and that is very hard to stomach for a person like me. 

As I may or may not have mentioned before, I am a person that highly relies on its routines (to a degree that it drives other people crazy). I do that for precisely the aforementioned reasons, and have been doing it for a very long time. It has been part of my education. My father is probably the most disciplined person that I know: gets up every day at 6 AM, has the same breakfast, workout at noon, lunch at 1, double espresso at 1:30, dinner at 7, bed at midnight. Every single day - even on the weekends. I don't know if you're reading this, dad, but if you do - it's absolutely fascinating and I admire you for being so incredibly disciplined. By more or less adjusting to these routines, I've always had great freedom of choice what I want to do - because I had the energy to consciously make these choices. 

This phenomenon also explains something that I've never really had a solid explanation for. In Germany, every young man at the age of 18 or 19 (depending on when you graduated from school) used to be required to do military service. Alternatively, you also had the option to do civil service, such as working in a retirement home, school or social service. A third alternative was to simply be exempt from the service by having health conditions, overweight, vision problems or drug consumption - the latter has been used fairly often. Now, when it would have been my turn to serve in the military, the German government had just abolished it. Everybody around me was happy - one more year to go to university, dabble around while doing work & travel in Australia or doing some social work for a year. And I - I was pissed. I wanted to go to the military. I didn't want to be a soldier, but I wanted to make the experience - and to a degree still do to this day. I'm by no means a warmonger, nor do I have a particular interest in weapons or killing people. What fascinated me was the ultimate discipline that you're taught in the military. I believe that this is something everybody should go through at some point, despite the fact that some of the routines are definitely pointless from a rational point of view. The key is to acquire discipline - and that was something I wanted to learn more and more. 

The urge to acquire this discipline stems from a time earlier in my life, when I was living in the United States. Before going there, I was a below-average athlete. I'd get bad grades in physical education classes, couldn't throw a ball properly, was fairly chubby and so on. By the time I got back, I was an above-average athlete, and I've been getting more athletic ever since. This is something I'm proud of, and something I was able to achieve through discipline. When I started playing Lacrosse in high school, we'd meet up every single day after school to do sprint training or weightlifting for 60 to 90 minutes. It was tough, man. Especially because our conditioning coach was a US Marine on vacation. I loved and hated every minute of it, but it did do two things: transform me into a great athlete and lay the base layer for all the routines that I have now. The routines that allow me to seize control over my life. 

Control Is Key

In his book "So Good That They Can't Ignore You", Cal Newport states that the "passion hypothesis" is simply wrong. The passion hypothesis? This hypothesis is the old mantra that "one should do what he or she is passionate about." However, when you ask most people what they're passionate about, the answers you will get are "traveling", "1. FC Köln", "reading" or "doing good in the world". How many of these people actually work in a field related to these fields? Barely any of them, and yet most of them are very content with what they do. Clearly, there must be something else that creates happiness in work. This something is what I like to call "control": the ability to determine what you do in your job. This ability does not just include the fact that you are free do to whatever you want to do, but also that you have the prerequisites, the abilities necessary to actually do it. For example, in my current job, I could create the greatest language course content ever - I just do not have the ability to do that and therefore, working on this matter makes me unhappy as I cannot control what I'm doing. On the other hand, when I'm working with my colleagues on solving productivity problems, I feel 100% in control and am super happy. 

Control is important. Now, how do you get it? Cal Newport argues that you first have to build up "career capital" in order to achieve control about your job. "Career capital" is defined as a rare and valuable asset that you have acquired over time. In my case, for instance, it's the ability to understand other people's problems and to find a solution by thinking outside the box and using my programming skills. But career capital doesn't come out of nowhere, it doesn't come from attending a two-day seminar (although I've been told that the Tony Robbins seminars might be a different case here - would love to try that some time). Career capital comes from deliberate practice: constantly challenging yourself, constantly facing the things that you aren't good at yet. And deliberate practice has one very important ingredient: discipline. 

"In order to be great, you have to practice the basics consistently well."

Deliberate practice also relates to another mantra of mine: "in order to be great, you have to practice the basics consistently well". In Lacrosse, you have to hit the gym and the wall often and regularly to become a better player - no need for acquiring fancy tricks, but (at least in Germany) having great stick skills and athletic ability goes a long way. In language learning, you don't need to understand the most complicated grammatical concepts - however, you should be VERY familiar with the important vocabulary, sentence structure and your ability to learn from mistakes. In nutrition, doing one week of green smoothies doesn't really get you anywhere when you normally eat what I'm eating right now (I just had two Krispy Kreme donuts and will definitely have a double cheeseburger with fries for lunch - I'm sitting in a civilized western enclave in the middle of the chaos that Santo Domingo is). And finally, doing a two day meditation retreat will not make your mind stronger in the long term - but doing it every day for ten minutes certainly will. 

All of this requires discipline. Sometimes it's raining and you'd much rather stay at home than going to the wall. Sometimes, you're hungover and really don't wanna learn vocabulary. Sometimes, that donut just looks to appealing. But with discipline, you will be able to push through - the reward will well be worth it. 

We've learned that discipline allows for two things: greater control of your day by minimizing decisions, and greater control of your life due to building of career capital. This allows us to create the first part of a not so mathematical equation: discipline = control. We've also learned that if you have control over what you do, it gives you the freedom to decide what you do. Therefore: control = freedom. Applying the law of transitivity, we then come to the conclusion that indeed discipline = freedom. 

Discipline leads to a healther, happier and healthier life. This is why it should be part of all our lives. And this is why I would like to constantly remind myself of it. A tattoo would be a great way to do just that. 

This post was written in the Krispy Kreme store of the Agora mall in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. 

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