Some Thoughts on Time

Last week, I had a guest come into our office for a feedback chat and he thanked me three times for taking the time to talk. I said “it’s my pleasure”. He came to share his thoughts on Join, so, if anything, I should be the one frantically thanking him.

When I said “Don’t worry about it, it’s truly my pleasure!” for the third time he replied, “Oh, but you’re a start-up founder, you guys haven’t got time for anything!”.

That’s what got me thinking: the idea that some people’s times is more valuable than others’.

Founder, Sh-mounder.

My opinion on time is a deceptively simple one: no matter who you are, you make time for the things that matter to you.

Period.

Always Busy

I consider myself privileged in that I get to relate to very different people daily. All the way from company directors, to waiters, restaurant managers and many students. Every single one of them plays a role at Join – as hiring managers, people at our partner venues and candidates.

Interacting with people with such contrasting lifestyles gets me thinking frequently about how each of us spends our time.

Chances are, if you are a director at a company, you are probably expected to take part in an array of meetings, events, and conferences. That does not mean you are time-poor but, rather, that your task prioritising is a harder one.

Still, many people love to dish out that they are “busy” as if it were a proxy for their importance. I came across a fantastic article on the topic by Mike Gladstone called “Busy is the New Stupid” inspired by Warren Buffett’s habit of avidly guarding his calendar.

The moral of the story here is quite simple: we all have 24 hours a day to go about our tasks. It is ultimately up to us to decide how to best allocate them.

That’s what it boils down to.

What are we doing with our time?

Ever since we put together our first dinners in the end of 2016, we get comments like “But why meet over dinner? Wouldn’t a call or coffee be easier?”.

From its inception Join's goal has been to connect people in a more human way, facilitating face-to-face conversations through our dinners. We've spoken and written a great deal about mindfulness, one of our core values, which is our ability to focus our attention on the now.

In other words, the art of living in the present.

But the bigger question is how each and every one of us is using their time. Not wanting to sound cliché, but in this day and age, we’ve got the highest number of resources and entertainment options available at the tip of our fingers almost 24/7. Naturally, choosing becomes a harder task.

With an almost limitless universe of choice, what do we pick?

Interestingly, research shows these are our daily averages:

• 40 minutes on YouTube
• 35 minutes on Facebook
• 15 minutes on Instagram

If we extrapolate, considering a 79-year old life, that’s five years and four months spent on social media. Incidentally – or perhaps alarmingly – that’s 1.6 times the time spent eating and drinking, three years and five months.

Curious about how you fare? You can access this link and estimate what you could be doing with the time you spend on social media. You probably won’t like the result.

At this point, I cannot help but share a fantastic commercial some friends sent me. They interviewed best friends, asked them about how often they met each other and, based on their life-expectancy and the frequency with which they saw each other, estimated how much time together left they had. The video is in Spanish but there are English subtitles.

Though it might make you sad, the core message here is one that emphasises the need for us to make more conscious choices regarding how we spend our time.

Finding Your Balance

I’m not here to advocate for a hard break on technology nor am I a Luddite. It’s up to each of us to find our own balance and, to do so, we need to assess what’s truly important to us.

This calls for introspection and self-reflection.

And this is where the problem lies.

A while back, reading on mindfulness, I came across what would become one of my favourite TED talks. It's a talk titled “Connected, but alone?” by MIT Professor Sherry Turkle in which she shows how our interactions with technology are not only shaping what we do, but who we are altogether.

She argues we use conversations with each other to learn how to have better conversations with ourselves. When we forego conversations with one another for quick messages, Tweets and posts, we greatly impair our capacity for introspection and self-reflection.

Professor Turkle argues that when we don’t exercise solitude, our capacity of being alone with our thoughts, we turn to other people in order to appease our cravings. We reach out to others to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. The sad truth, she says, is that we treat others as “spare parts”.

There’s another fantastic video on the topic from The School of Life highlighting our need to spend time alone in order regroup our thoughts and best connect with those around us.

Going back to Professor Turkle, she hints at a much bigger problem when she says “people can’t get enough of each other, but only at a distance”. This showcases a much direr consequence of how we live: our need for control.

Instant Gratification

Our need, or compulsion, to control where we want to put our attention. To “customise” our lives and our relationships as a consequence of a collective expectation transfer.

Expectation transfer happens when someone shifts their experience from a person/thing into an expectation for another person/thing. Even if done involuntarily, more often than not, it leads to disappointment, especially considering our "on-demand" way of living.

For millions of products available (with next day delivery) on Amazon, millions of movies available (right now) on Netflix and thousands of potential dates (tonight) on Tinder, the choice is 100% yours to make.

But real relationships can get pretty messy at times. And that’s life, real life.

“It takes place in real time”, says Professor Turkle, "and you cannot control what you’re going to say". Rather, you can control what you’ll say, but not how others will react.

That breaks the paradigm of us having 100% control. 

Things Take Time

At Join we help people find jobs by connecting them to people and organisations who share their values. We deal mainly with entry-level roles and, unsurprisingly, we find ourselves frequently speaking to candidates who haven’t figured out what they want to do.

Absolutely nothing wrong there.

However, living in a society in which appearances count more than ever makes it easier than ever for people to fall trap for the herd mentality and pick a career path and a lifestyle that does not make any sense to them in order to “fit in”.

But why am I talking about career choices when I set out to talk about time?

Well, that’s where you’ll spend around 15% of your life, so it’d better be worth your while.

The bad news is that no matter what career you pick, success will demand time and effort. Got a brilliant idea that’ll make you a millionaire overnight? You'll discover a lot of 'overnight successes' were years in the making.

Moreover, even if you were to achieve success in a very short time span, you’d probably find yourself still dissatisfied: we value the things we have to strive to achieve.

I’ve recently shared a Simon Sinek video that ties the concepts together: “Everything you want you can have instantaneously, except job satisfaction and strength of relationships. There ain’t no app for that!”

In Simon's words, “the things that truly matter take time to achieve”. There's some sort of beauty in this contrast: setting a goal, persevering and taking your time to achieve it in a world of instant gratification.

In order to achieve big things we need to make choices, and sacrifice some options in the process.

Choices and Trade-Offs

During my bachelor’s in computer engineering we spoke a great deal about trade-offs. Faster processor, battery runs out faster. Compress files, lose quality. I’m a huge fan of the concept in that it’s applicable to pretty much anything in life: pick A and you forego B, C, D…

I’m not a fan of “maximising efficiency” when it comes to my daily routine. Instead of taking up a lot of things and trying to allocate each some time, I prefer to assess which ones are the things that will truly contribute to where I want to get and cross out the things that are not a priority.

This is what Warren Buffett calls his 25/5 rule: list 25 things, elect the top 5 and focus on those. Don’t spend time on the other 20 since they will take away time from your top five priorities.

I had a chat with a life coach some years back, Joana Areias, who shared a similar framework. She told me to think of my life in as a cartesian plan. I get to decide what goes up on the y-axis, my priorities, but the x-axis is time.

It’s not that I, or any of us, needs to know the exact (x, y) coordinates of where we want to get, but we should all make an effort to list our priorities and map out the general region where we’d like to go.

The analogy is particularly powerful in that it shows that we cannot escape time. According to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, time is the one dimension we can never escape. He argues that time's omnipresence is what gives us a sense of urgency and forces us to act.

In short: disconnect and get to know yourself, map out your priorities and spend your time accordingly.

Life will be more worthwhile.

I could finish off by asking whether you consider this was a good use of your time, but, that’s ultimately up to you. Once again, it’s not about escaping the choice but, rather, dealing with it or, to quote Blaise Pascal:

Don't try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.

If you’ve read this far, firstly, a big thank you. If these thoughts made you stop and ponder a bit, I've achieved my goal!

Ricardo Tannus is the founder of Join, an HR-Tech startup that connects talented students to companies over blind dinners, reducing biases and helping talent meet opportunity in a natural way.