Every morning you get paid. Twenty-four hours, straight into your account. The busiest person you know got exactly the same amount. So did the person who keeps telling you they haven’t got time.
Arnold Bennett put it better than I can, back in 1908:
You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions.
No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day (1908), Chapter I, The Daily Miracle
He wrote it for London office workers who felt the working day had swallowed their lives. Swap the office for a phone full of notifications and it could have been written this morning.
Same hours, different days
So if we all get the same twenty-four hours, why do some people seem to get so much more out of theirs?
In my experience it comes down to being deliberate. You decide what matters most to you and you make sure it gets time, before the day decides for you. That might be a gym session. It might be time with your family. It might be an hour with a good book. What you choose matters less than the fact that you chose it.
Bennett’s own suggestion was modest. Ninety minutes, three evenings a week, spent on something that grows your mind. No life overhaul, just a few protected hours.
The hour that holds up the other 23
Here’s an idea I keep coming back to. For a lot of people there’s one hour in the day that makes the other twenty-three work. For some it’s reading. For others it’s writing, meditating, a walk, or sitting quietly and thinking about how things are really going. Protect it and the rest of the day seems to have more room in it. Let it go and everything else starts to wobble.
Mine is a mix of reading, writing and meditating, and it’s in my day every day. When I’ve protected it I’m calmer, clearer and better company. When I’ve let it slip, I notice. Usually the people around me notice first.
There’s a story often told about Gandhi. On a day packed with commitments, the people around him suggested he skip his meditation because there simply wasn’t time. His answer, so the story goes, was that he was so busy he’d need even more of it. I can’t tell you it happened exactly like that. I love the logic though. The busier the day, the more that hour matters.
I wrote in Done Beats Perfect that the things fighting for my attention were usually on my calendar, so my answer was simple: “I schedule my time for me.” And I make it specific. The appointment doesn’t just say “me time“. It says something like “5 mile trail run” or “20 minutes of mantra based meditation“. Once it’s in the diary, it’s an appointment like any other.
Be where you are
Protecting the time is half of it. The other half is actually being there.
You can be at the gym and still be in your inbox. You can be at the dinner table and still be in tomorrow’s meeting. Your body’s in one place and your brain’s somewhere else, and the time you worked so hard to protect quietly leaks away.
Being present means showing up the right way for the thing you’re doing. If it’s time with someone you care about, give them all of you. If it’s your hour, let it be your hour.
Time is the one thing we never get back, so where it goes is worth a decision. Time you give fully, to the things and the people that matter to you, pays you back. I wrote more about the small daily habits that do the heavy lifting in nothing changes until you do.
If you could protect just one hour tomorrow, what would you fill it with?
