Recalibrate the time of your life which is approx 4000 Weeks ( 80 Years )

The average human lifespan is abysmally brief. Living to be 80 years old gives you around 4,000 weeks. It’s no secret that time is one of our most precious resources. Today, many of us are haunted by the feeling that we should be more productive, more efficient, or devoting our time to something else entirely.

The truth is that our obsession with productivity is taking a toll. Instead of reaching a perfect state of efficiency, “life hacks” and time management techniques leave us feeling stressed and empty.

You'll Never be Able to Master Time

Research shows that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be anxious about not having enough time to get everything done. And our capitalist economy is to blame.

Capitalism drives us to leverage our time, abilities, and resources in order to reap the greatest profit. In the process, many wealthy people achieve success at the cost of living a meaningful life. Meanwhile, the gig economy has forced those less fortunate to work multiple jobs with little financial security.

The more you try to conquer your time, the more frustrated, stressed, and empty you feel. This is called the paradox of limitation. In reality, you’ll never be able to accomplish everything you’d like to.

Our ways of thinking about time are inherently modern.

The premodern people weren’t worried about having too little time is that they didn’t think of their lifetimes as limited. Instead, people considered their time on Earth as an inconsequential prelude to eternity. So there was no need to worry about what you didn’t achieve in this lifetime.

In the modern era, people began to understand history as always moving toward an idealized future. With the shift from religion at the heart of meaning, people began to occupy themselves with making the most of their limited time on Earth.

The development of clocks also played a role in our modern time-related troubles. Mechanical clocks became particularly important during the development of modern industrial labor.

While laborers had once been paid for vaguely defined terms like “a day’s work,” during the Industrial Revolution, factory owners began paying their employees by the hour so as to increase their profits. As a result, time slowly transformed from concept to resource – something to be used rather than the stuff life was made of.

By facing our finitude, we can cultivate a fulfilling life.

Humans have limited time to spend on this planet. Our finitude defines our existence.

Unfortunately, most of us spend our time avoiding or denying this fact. Heidegger calls this “falling.” Some of us avoid the idea of finitude by seeking distractions or losing ourselves in the daily grind. Others take comfort with the belief that they don’t have to choose what to do at all. These people follow a prescriptive existence by getting married or remaining in a soul-destroying job.

The realization that your time on Earth is limited doesn’t have to be a morbid thought.

Embracing finitude shouldn’t be about feeling stressed about mortality.

From another perspective, it’s miraculous that you have any time at all. No cosmic law guarantees our survival.

According to Heidegger, embracing finitude means realizing that every choice about what to do with your time requires sacrifices. But rather than feeling defeated that you can’t accomplish everything, your choices could symbolize a commitment to choosing what matters most to you.

Become a better procrastinator by prioritizing limited goals.

Procrastination is a human tendency and is inevitable. To become better procrastinators, it’s time to shift our focus from attempting to get everything done to prioritizing what matters most.

The first principle to becoming a better procrastinator is by paying yourself first with your time.

The second principle is limiting your works in progress.

The final principle is to avoid second-tier priorities.

There’s more to your distractions than meets the eye.

Achieving complete control over your attention is impossible and undesirable. According to neuroscientists, involuntary attention is crucial to our survival. It enables us to move out of the way of an approaching bus. At the same time, to accomplish our goals, we need to master a certain level of focus.

Today, the most obvious distractions we face come from digital technologies. Companies' quest for “persuasive design” keeps us addicted to our screens.

Live for the present moment rather than for the future.

Have you ever felt like tasks always take longer than planned? The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter realized this phenomenon and gave it a name: “Hofstadter’s law.” According to this law, if you try to give yourself extra time to account for running overtime, you’ll still end up running over your new estimated time.

Hofstadter proclaimed his law somewhat in jest. But if you’ve ever tried to plan a project, you know its principle tends to be true. Yet, while we realize that life is often out of our control, many of us spend our lives tediously trying to schedule every minute of our time.

Take up hobbies or spend time with family and friends to reap the benefits of leisure time.

The decline of leisure was a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution. Factory owners encouraged workers to use their time off in ways that would enhance their productivity at work. This was, ironically, exacerbated by labor reformers and union leaders who argued that workers would use their additional free time to improve themselves through education or cultural activities.

This idea of spending our free time well continues to grip us today. To reap the pleasure of experience fully, it’s about time that we redefined our approach to leisure. This leisure can be experienced in true sense with our extended families, which was the norm in India few decades back.

Practice cosmic insignificance therapy instead of worrying about your life’s purpose.

Finding yourself doubting how you spend your days can be deeply unsettling. But it’s a necessary first step toward building a fulfilling life. Which leads us to a fundamental question about time management: how do we make the time we have count?

When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020 forcing governments across the world to impose lockdowns, there was a general consensus that along with the trauma and loss, the pandemic was a tipping point which made us pause and consider what really matters. Even the underfunded healthcare systems and racial inequalities that the pandemic exposed contributed to the feeling that we were finally being reminded of what matters most.

The problem with trying to pin that down is that it can be an overwhelmingly grandiose exercise. Many New Age enthusiasts believe that we’re each endowed with a lofty “life purpose.” So, if you aren’t in a position to leave your office job, you might feel like having a meaningful life isn’t on the cards for you. In reality, however, what you do with your time has no significance in the eyes of the universe.

We’re biologically wired to perceive the universe from our point of view. This motivates us to reproduce and pass along our genes. But in the grand scheme of universal time, our individual lives are completely insignificant.

In the eyes of cosmic insignificance therapy, any career is as worthwhile as preparing a nourishing meal for your child. It doesn’t matter that you aren’t as talented as Mozart or Albert Einstein. In the eyes of the universe, writing a book or pursuing any goal that you care about is a worthy way to spend your 4,000 weeks.