Newsletter Week 48 | 2021

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Hey there.I hope you've had a great week.

What I've made for you

It's not something I'm quite ready to release yet, but I'm super excited to share it with you: I've completely remade my website. It has a similar design, but is now much faster, lighter, and most importantly: it allows me to share things with you in a better way. Again, it's not 100% ready, but will be before long.

A small highlight:I've made tags for my book notes.

It's fun to see what I lean towards reading. Here's to reading lots of books in 2022; new and old, familiar and unfamiliar.

Investing time

I've come to be very protective of my time. I get restless and uneasy when I feel that I am wasting it.Perhaps this is for the better; after all, we only get one life. However, for the past month, I've attempted to counter-balance it with mindfulness and being present. I've found that to be difficult. It's always “I should be… right now.”

So what have I done about it? Something so simple, so obvious, that when you hear it, you'll think “is that it?” But I'm serious. I started keeping a schedule. And not just for appointments, birthdays, or events. I have it for literally everything. I do something called Timeboxing, where you divide your days into smaller increments. Think 30 min, an hour, 2 hours, or maybe even 5 minutes — like Elon Musk supposedly does.

I first tried timeboxing after reading Indistractable by Nir Eyal. Actually, while the book resonated at the time, I only followed it for a while, but then stopped because it took more effort to do than I wanted to put in.

What's different this time? What made me realize the magic of a ✨calendar✨?I started thinking about the concept of investing time. Every day, hour, minute, second, you get to choose what to invest in. You have limited capital, and it'll be spent no matter what. Do you spend, or do you invest?That was the question I asked myself. I found that I was spending too much time on things that felt productive (or I justified mindless browsing, etc.), which left me dissatisfied.

So now I schedule my weeks ahead of time. In addition, I plan the next day every night, in case I any important changes or re-prioritization occurs.

Here's how I think about it. You only have so many seconds in your life — and you don't get any more of them. So you can either throw them away, or you can put them to good use. So it'd be a good idea to invest them in spending time on something you value. For this, you have a set of values. That could be family, health, career, travelling, virtue — anything, really.Now, here's the issue. Some things just drain time and energy from us. It might not even align with our values — i.e., laying on the couch, watching random videos on YouTube (guilty). Sure, there should be time for doing such things. As long as we know what we're trading it for.

If you intentionally schedule time for your values, you're voting for becoming the type of person that embraces those values. Maybe you say you value health, but you don't really ever prioritize it. To that, I say: put your money (time) where your mouth is!

At least, that's what I've begun doing. It feels amazing. But it's also very hard to do, because it requires you to actively make tough choices about your time. It requires you to be disciplined.I don't follow my schedule perfectly. That's just how it is. But I do my damn best, and that's all I could ever wish for.

Take ownership of your time. Schedule time for your values. You only get so much of it.

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To your success. Regards,

Christian Bager Bach Houmann