Reclaiming Your Time: How to Live Like You Mean It

Time is the most limited and valuable resource we have.

And as much as it sucks, most of us don’t have full control over how we use our time.

As great as the digital age is, the reality is that we’re surrounded by attention-sucking technology that makes it easier than ever to mindlessly waste away hours in our days.

If we want to be as successful as possible in the limited time we have on this earth, we need to value our time more than any other resource.

But you already knew this. This notion isn’t some profound insight that suddenly unlocks more meaning and success.

The bottom line is that our actions rarely reflect our words. We verbalize our intentions but don’t act, and get locked in cycles of disappointment and underachieving.

We say we value our time but our calendars don’t reflect it. Or, they do, but don’t actually reflect how we spend our days.

This is why we have to obsess over being deliberate about assigning our time to things that are valuable to us.

In doing so, we enable ourselves with a mindset that allow us to overcome the dopamine-driven distractions around us and ultimately spend our time on things that bring us meaning and happiness.

Everyone uses a calendar in some form or another.

Your calendar is the highest-level framework for your day. It’s a portal into your goals, plans, and intentions.

Calendars aren’t just for work. If you truly value your time, you need to be deliberate about how you use every hour of your day.

Some may find it excessive to schedule things like social events or date nights, but what they don’t realize is that the act of assigning time to these things makes them more valuable.

Adding these things to your calendar says I value this thing. In fact, I value it so much that I’m dedicating the most valuable resource I have—my time—to it.

When you start viewing your time in this way, you use your time deliberately and don’t leave room for shenanigans.

Of course, if shenanigans are something truly important for you, schedule them.

If you’re constantly falling into the trap of doom scrolling social media or watching youtube videos, I’d bet a fat chunk of change that you’re not being deliberate about assigning value to your time every day.

When we only formulate our schedule around the necessities of our lives—work, eat, sleep, repeat—then we’re left at the mercy of our short-term pleasure-seeking brain. The part of you that convinces you, or subconsciously forces you to, pick up your phone and open TikTok.

This part of our brain isn’t very good at aligning with our long term goals. We need to be aware of this and build systems that keep this part of the brain powerless when we’re most susceptible.

Our brains didn’t evolve to plan for long-term success. Our ancestors only ever needed to worry about immediate nourishment or pleasure, and the idea of next week or next month wasn’t an inherently important thing in our evolutionary past.

Nowadays, things are different. Many of us are blessed enough to no longer have to worry about today's or tomorrow’s meal.

We owe it to ourselves to utilize our highly advanced prefrontal cortexes to outsmart our dopamine-seeking complexes.

Our brains’ short-term wants are almost never aligned with our long-term desires. This first step is recognizing this.

If something’s important to you, schedule it into your calendar. In doing so, you’re choosing to assign your valuable time to that thing.

Naturally, a key step in claiming back every minute of your day is defining what’s important to you.

Everything else doesn’t matter, and there’s no reason it should be a part of your day.

Of course, importance is a spectrum, and your days will vary in how they look at different periods of your life.

The point here is that you need to be conscious of what’s important to you, and your calendar must always be in alignment with that. Otherwise, you’re not being deliberate with your time and ultimately not valuing it as much as you should.

Leverage tools to set stricter boundaries.

We’re only human. We’re flawed and sometimes our short-term desires get the best of us.

With that said, it’s up to us to recognize this and do something about it.

Be proactive. Use app blockers religiously. One of the best things I ever did for taking control of my time was install an app blocker (I use Opal).

Find other systems that make it impossible to fall victim to mindless pleasure chasing.

Learn to say no.

Setting clear boundaries also means being able to say no. It’s so easy to throw your workout out the window once a friend asks you to go to happy hour.

Maybe you haven’t seen this person in awhile and it’s more valuable to you to spend your afternoon with them than hitting your daily workout. If that’s the case, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it.

But your fitness routine is probably important to you. You did put it on your calendar after all. Would it hurt to wait until the weekend to see that person?Maybe, but probably not. What it would hurt, though, is hitting today’s fitness goal.

It’s never that we “don’t have time” for something. It’s that we don’t value that thing enough to assign our valuable time to it, or haven’t been intentional enough about planning or using our time.

Using our time in a way that’s effective and rewarding takes planning and clear boundaries. On it’s surface, it might seem excessive. But the truth is this:

The only way to live a life true to yourself is by taking control of your time and deliberately investing it in things that matter most to you.