Six days · About five minutes a day
Too Much To Do
See where the time goes, take away what's unnecessary, and do one thing at a time.
Your six days
- Where the time goes — Free in your browser
- Busy is not the same as living
- Only this moment
- Take some of it away
- Two or three things
- One step
A taste of Day 1: Where the time goes
Welcome. Too much to do is partly about the list and partly about how we hold it. Over six short days we'll practise lightening both. Today, we notice where the time actually goes.
Thus it is: we do not receive a short life, but we make it a short one, and we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them.Seneca · On the Shortness of Life, section 1
Aubrey Stewart, 1889
Seneca isn't scolding the busy here. He's pointing at a leak. Time is less scarce than scattered, a few minutes lost to a notification, a few to a task that didn't need doing. Before anyone changes how they work, they need to see it plainly. So today's practice isn't to do less, or faster. It's to look at an ordinary day and notice where the minutes went. You may find the problem is smaller, or different, than the feeling suggests.
Try the reflection
Recall yesterday in outline: morning, afternoon, evening. Don't try to be exact. Where did time slip away? Where did it feel well spent? Name a couple of each, as a neutral observer. No fixing yet. Notice any urge to judge, and let it pass. Take three minutes.
One question to take with you
Where did yesterday's time go, in a few words?
Day 1 is free. Days 2–6 are planned for the iPhone app, coming soon. This is reflection, not medical advice.