The year I stopped lying to myself.

Time. And the lie I told.

It’s been about a year since I left the only career I've ever known. Over this long past year, I have been more than occasionally asked: “what are you up to these days” and “what are you going to do next?” Mostly, I have demurred because I don’t have a concise or clever answer. The real answer is likely both wholly overwhelming and hard to turn into small talk. The truth is I am working hard -- almost exclusively -- on better valuing my own time.  

You see, during the last twelve months, I came to realize something both profound and profoundly obvious: I never understood the value of time. Moreover, I used to lie and I say I did. I’m pretty sure I am not alone. When most of us say that we value time above everything else, we are, generally speaking, lying. And when we say that we never have any of it, we are also, generally speaking, lying. We tell these lies to others and we tell them to ourselves.

I’ve told these lies countless times. I didn’t think that I was lying at the time. But I was. To value time above all else means more than to pay lip service to it. It means to either pay the highest imaginable cost for it or to get the most out of it, or both. In my case, I would occasionally pay for convenience -- to get some of my time back, But, rarely did I get a lot out of that reclaimed time. Upon reflection, I’ve learned that this was because I did not know what I most desired from my time. Was it time alone? Time with my wife? With my kids? Time to do nothing? Time to get healthy? Time to create? Maybe? But how would I spend that time? What would I want to do and feel? And why? If I’d never fully considered how I wanted to use time, how could I possibly place a value on it? All I knew, vaguely, from cliche, anxiety and exhaustion was that I wanted more of it. Beyond that, I had no clue.

This is one of those realizations that some, very fortunate people, come to earlier in life. Others don’t come to it until much later. Sadly, most never come to it at all. I came to it almost exactly in middle-age, which feels like it makes me kind of average. However, I also came to it with benefits and luxuries that most people do not get. So, yes, for me, this was an insight of privilege. But it is not necessarily an insight that requires privilege. As I type, I can’t help but think that this entire premise reeks of bougie, self-help, therapy BS. But I also believe that a proper valuation of time can also be one born simply from necessity or pragmatism or open mindedness. Somewhere in the last year -- between great privilege and necessity -- I finally learned the value of time. 

Busy and cheap.

Contrary to what I thought, being very busy rarely makes one value time more. In fact, being too busy, overworked or overwhelmed can trick us into thinking that deeply worthless pursuits are valuable. Moreover, busy-ness often obscures and endlessly defers a more important question: what would be the best use of my time?

For decades, I would tell any and everyone how much I valued time and that, simultaneously, how I never had enough of it. But, when I had children and looked back upon my childless twenties, wherein I would spend weekends watching complete seasons of “Lost” and half a day considering which restaurant to get dinner at, I realized that I once had plenty of time. In more recent years, between trying my best to be a good enough husband and father, running a start-up and trying to serve my family, friends, employees and clients, I complained weekly about how little time I had; about how I had no time to go to the gym or meditate or eat right or sit down and just be next to my wife or do something special with my kids or start painting again or whatever. I was adamant about my lack of time and how every hour was dictated by something or someone else beyond my control. This was all partially true. But there were also those 8am phone calls I did not need to agree to and the 11pm Google Slide updates I did not need to make and the 11am fantasy football research and the time I spent cleaning my kids room because the mess bothered me and hours I spent complaining to my wife about this or that thing. None of these things were especially unusual or insidious. None took up a lot of time. But, collectively, they proved that -- yes -- I did have some time available to myself and -- no -- I did not use those available moments particularly well.

Questions of desire.

So, why did I tell myself these lies? It’s not, I don’t think, because I didn’t believe the words I was saying. I think, rather, it was because I was saying something I wished were true. What I believe we really mean to say -- or should say -- is: “I wish I made better use of the time available to me.” This statement is likely more honest and accurate. It is also more vulnerable because it begs the question: “what does a better use of time mean to me?”

It is hard to pivot when you are spinning. It is hard to fix the ship when you are out at sea. And it is hard to reclaim and reimagine time when you are moving so quickly through it. But if we all accept that we do have some time available and that we want that time to feel valuable, then where do we begin? I began, for one, much later than I wish I had. That being said, the thing about time is that all you have is all you have. And there is no point in looking back. I am forty six now and realized that I spent most of my life doing the opposite of valuing time. Even today, I do not value it as much as I would like to. But, since the day I left my last job, about a year ago, I have been on an impossibly simple, if existential, quest to answer the question: “What do I most desire?” In trying to answer this question, I resolved to actually answer several questions:

• What do I most desire emotionally?
• What do I most desire physically?
• What do I most desire in my relationship with my wife?
• What do I most desire in my relationships with my children?
• What do I most desire in my relationship with my family?
• What do I most desire in my relationships with my friends?
• What do I most desire to produce in this life?
• What do I most desire to help in this life?
• What do I most desire to be known for in this life?

These questions were brutally hard to respond to. They required an unflinching, almost child-like level of honesty. They required that I be open to selfishness and worthlessness. They required that I get past the superficial answers (“I desire to travel” or “I desire to accumulate significant wealth” or “I desire to spend more one on one time with my wife”) and into the next question: why do I desire these things? Normally around the fourth of fifth time asking “why” I would locate the truest, deepest desire. Eventually, I wrote down my answers to each of these questions. In retrospect, only one or two answers to each really mattered. The rest were nibbling at or avoiding the truth. And, unsurprisingly, many of the same feelings spanned across all of the dimensions of my desire.

Then what?

I then took this nine question and answer grid I had created and I asked myself, “what can I do with the time available to me to get closer to these desires?” Sometimes the answers were obvious (“go to Pilates every Friday at noon” or “ask your inlaws to babysit for four date nights per month,” or “write about music or design or baseball statistics for five hours per week”). In other cases the answers were more complicated or dependent on others. Regardless, after spending weeks trying to understand what I most desired in life, I sat down with my wife (and then my therapist) and talked through something that was part promise, part code and barely a plan. 

The work seemed impossible but the premise was simple: if I lived closer to what I most desired, I would be more fulfilled and more nourished. If I was more fulfilled and more nourished, I could be of better service to the people and things that matter most to me. And, perhaps most importantly, if I was intentional about using my available time in honor of this commitment I was making, I would be more likely to succeed in all of the above.

In doing this, unsurprisingly, I realized just how far away I was from living close to my true desires and how much time and effort I had spent getting better and better at things that did not nourish me, my loved ones or the things I most value. My life has been filled with more good fortune and wonderful moments than I could have ever hoped for. But that is in no way the same thing as saying, “I have really valued my own time.” In fact, the inverse was more true. I let everyone and everything else value the time in my life because I was almost never intentional about it. 

One year later.

When I consider my calendar now, I look at every day and every week and I overlay it with the promises I made to myself. I now block white space based on an allocation that generally lines up with the desires I articulated to myself. If my available time strays too far from my answers, I bristle. I feel as though I have been robbed -- by myself. Every few months, I revisit the list to see if any of my answers feel obsolete or, inversely, feel quite present or urgent. When these changes occur, so do the hours of my day and week. I then reallocate my “time portfolio,” make a promise to myself, and update my wife (and therapist). 

Today, my life feels precisely as valuable as the correlation between my portfolio of time and my most deeply held desires. The immovable priorities in my calendar were nowhere to be found on my schedule one year ago. They are the foundation of how I value my time rather than a wish list that gets broken for other priorities. I don’t blame work for the temporal dysmorphia of my past. I blame myself and the lie I used to tell.

This is not a cautionary tale about mid-life pivots, or near burn out or how, eventually, if you are lucky enough, money can help you buy back your own time. I mean, I guess it is partly all of those things. But this was really intended to be something more like a helpful confession. My confession is that I used to lie about how much I valued time and that I failed to correct the lie. But in order to stop telling the lie, I had to first resolve for myself that the best way to value time is to do with it what I most profoundly desire. Sometimes the “it” is simple and obvious. Sometimes it takes negotiating. Sometimes, it fails. But, (a) there is always some time and (b) that through this process of getting closer to desire, we become less shameful and more empathetic to the needs of others. 

Overly sentimental conclusion.

Whether we are young, single and just starting out, or in the middle and completely stuck or buried with responsibility or on the other side of things and full of both freedom and regret, we always have some time. It may be minutes or hours. Hopefully, it is many years. But until we shamelessly consider that which we most desire in our lives, we cannot honestly say that we most value time. In fact, we can more accurately say that our time is cheap. It is in understanding the replacement value of our time -- what we most desire to be doing but are not -- that we see an accurate valuation.

But when we do align our available time with our greatest desires, we feel more nourished and less repressed. We can be better communicators and better listeners. When we fill our own tanks, we can drive faster and farther. We can be better partners, parents, friends, employees, bosses, volunteers, slackers and workers. (How’s that for a rousing conclusion?)

For years, people would say things to me like “be kind to yourself” or “get some quality time” or something Hallmark-y about how you have to love yourself first to love others. I understood the sentiment but also cringed at it. The cringe was in part because of the glittering generality of it all -- a pet peeve of mine. But it was also the discomfort of knowing that the sentiment seemed true to me, but also impossible. Turns out, it was not impossible. All I had to do was quit my job, change my email address, clear my entire calendar, ponder life for a month without interruption, stop lying to myself and get more therapy. (written with an eye roll)

Maybe after reading this you can skip a few of those steps.