Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman statesman and a stoic philosopher, who recognized that
if we are to live well, we must be constant students of the greatest subject of all — life
itself. In his moral essay, On the Shortness of Life, Seneca, offers us an urgent reminder
on the non-renewability of our most important resource: our time. So, with that in mind,
here are 10 of the most important insights for time management from the writings of Seneca.
1. Treat time as a commodity Seneca says “People are frugal in guarding
their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful
of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy”.
Seneca cautions that we fail to treat time as a valuable resource, even though it’s
arguably our most precious and least renewable one. Imagine walking down the street and seeing
a very rich guy just throwing his money away. You will definitely call that person was insane.
And yet we see others—and ourselves—throw away something far more valuable every day:
our Time. The amount we get is uncertain but surely limited. It’s clearly more insane
to waste time than money because unlike money, we can’t make any more when it runs out!
To realize the value of one year, ask a student who failed a grade.
To realize the value of one month, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.
To realize the value of one week, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper.
To realize the value of one hour, ask the person who just missed a train.
To realize the value of one second, ask the person who narrowly avoided an accident.
And to realize the value of one millisecond, ask the person who took the Silver Medal at
the Olympics.
Well the amount of time we get is uncertain, the one thing that is certain is that that
time is limited. Money and property can increase and decrease depending on luck or effort but
our time is fixed. Death creeps up on time wasters, people who assume time is cheap because
when employed correctly, time becomes an amplifier. When spent without consideration, it becomes
a persistent source of regret.
2. Don’t invest your time preparing for life
According to Seneca “He who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out
every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow’.
We are all guilty of spending way too much of our time preparing for life. Seneca pushes
us to live right now. To not delay our happiness. To not think that happiness lies in the future.
He criticizes those who think that they can work diligently until around age 60 when they
finally retire, and can be ‘happy’. Our future is uncertain and it’s not in your
control. The life in the future you’re working towards may never come. We are so busy and
worried about the future that we often let the present slip away, allowing time to rush
past unobserved and unseized. And then when we are old and on our deathbeds we finally
realise how short and valuable life is, left with a regret of not making the most of it
when we could.
Seneca compares time to a rushing stream, that won’t always flow. If you were in the
middle of a desert dying of thirst, and you came across a stream of water but you are
not sure when it would stop — wouldn’t you drink much of it as you possibly could?
Just like water, we should use as much of our time as possiblein making the most of
our present.
Your 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond are all worth planning but don’t allow them to take away
the precious present.
You can only live one moment at a time, and you can only live it once, so choose to live
in the moment.
3. Live life for your own self To quote Seneca “So you must not think a
man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just
existed long”
We all have certain things that we want in our life, whether it’s a dream job, a dream
house, a dream relationship, or that dream vacation. But majority of us don’t even
come close to achieving many of these things because we are stuck with the job we can’t
stand just to pay the bills, or a partner we pretend to love because we don’t want
to be alone. You’re just being tossed and turned by everything that’s coming at you,
and in today’s world, there’s a lot coming at you. We then fool our-selves by telling
us that we don’t have enough time to try new pursuits. Being busy is always your choice.
Being busy with things we don’t like is the greatest distraction from living, we routinely
coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from
our selves, mistaking the doing for the being. The best way you can invest your time is by
investing in creating a life you love living. If you don’t know what you love or what
you want, then ask yourself these questions -
If I had more time, what are the things I could do?
Or If I can change something right now around
or about me, what would it be?
You may realize that you want to change your job or you want to get in shape or pursue
a new hobby. You can start by waking up early and use that extra hour for doing those things
that you love. Time is precious, and it's ticking away for
all of us. The longer you wait to start making changes, the longer you will spend your life
working to make someone else's dream a reality.
4. Practice Premeditatio Malorum As we learn from Seneca “While wasting our
time hesitating and procrastinating, life goes on”
Procrastination occurs when a conflict between short term gratification of impulses like
to do nothing and waste time and the long term commitments like making a sales report
or editing this video is won by the former party. In psychology this is called time inconsistency.
Even though doing meaningful work over the course of years is more important to most
of us than lounging around, the human brain has a very dated bias towards what is here
and now. However, Seneca gives us a way to fight this with a very effective and a simple
method. The Stoics called it Premeditatio Malorum. The idea behind this is to ask yourself
before you do something about what can go wrong. It’s a form of negative visualization,
and once you’ve identified the distractions or problems, you can design around them with
preparation. By acknowledging distractions beforehand, and then in response, setting
a suitable time, place, and starting point, you can bypass the allure of short-term impulses
ahead of time. If you prepare yourself by scheduling ahead whatever it is you want done,
you’re two to three times more likely to follow through.
5. Make long term rewards immediate To Seneca “Putting things off is the biggest
waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising
the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy”
Our need to procrastinate is most powerful right at the start of work. Even if you’ve
removed all distractions, and you’re ready to get to work at 8 AM — as you had planned
— to your brain, the allure of finding an excuse to do something easier is still very
strong. The hardest challenge is finding a way to make that starting effort less unpleasant.
The key here is expectancy. That’s what we crave when we want to delay something that
we know benefits us. That’s the gap between short-term impulses and a long-term reward.
The reason that it’s often hard to start something is that there is no expectation
of an immediate reward. Sometimes, the reward is years away. However if you bundle your
work with the expectancy of an immediate reward, you give yourself a good reason to start.
For example, if you procrastinate by watching youtube, you can make a deal that you’re
not allowed to watch youtube until a certain amount of work is done. This way you get rewarded
by completing the unpleasant work with something immediate.
6. Make the most of your free time As we learn from Seneca “It is not that
we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and
a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were
all well invested”. We all work hard to earn two things: money
and free time that we can spend on leisure activities. We work 8–9 hours a day so that
we can earn free time, while we endlessly waste that hard-earned free time on the most
irrelevant things like drinking in the pub with co-workers or friends, watching TV shows
or just gossiping around the water cooler. As some people point out, you have to stop
and say, “No more.” No more wasting the free time you earn
Even if you enjoy your day job, keep time spent working at a minimum. You’ll never
get those overtime hours back, they are gone forever. Most of us spend our precious one
hour lunch breaks eating at our desks. Instead we should make good of our lunch breaks. Read,
write or exercise. If you work in a city, visit a museum or gallery. Maybe start an
office reading group that can meet at lunchtimes. On weekends or on evenings when you have ample
of free time, make the most of it by meditating, reading, exercising or journaling or anything
that could add a value to your life. If you want to beat mediocrity and start living your
life, then you need to start making the most of your free time.
7. Spend time reflecting on your past Seneca informs us “But life is very short
and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future”
For Seneca, time is divided into three parts: The present which is transitory,
The future which is uncertain and The past which is unalterable.
All the modern time management lessons tell us to focus on the present with a view to
the future. They all focus on the uncertain and transitory. Whereas Seneca tells us to
pay attention to our past. If we are to extend our life we must have enough self-awareness
to remember the lessons of our past so that we can be more effective today. When you actually
take a moment to stop and think, to comb through who you have been in the past, and really
what made you that person, it’s pretty enlightening. Reflecting on your past and doing some serious
introspection does the soul good. It helps you be present, and comprehend the changes
within yourself that have occurred. Plus it gives you a clear, focused idea of who you
are today, and who you want to be tomorrow. It even helps you take responsibility and
ownership of yourself and your actions. Sometimes it can be difficult for you to see how far
you’ve come, especially if you tend to compare yourself to others but spending time on reflecting
on your past gives you the space and time to see just how far you’ve come in life.
8. Stop wasting time in life’s trivialities As we learn from Seneca “If such people
want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their
own”
We are all guilty of spending way too much of our time in trivialities. More and more
of our time nowadays is spent starring at screens, either for work or on social media,
trolling through yet more status updates and posting endless selfies. How often are we
caught in giving our time to others for nothing more than the pursuit of monetary and social
profit? Casually playing a video game with no particular
merit is throwing time away, time you could be developing a useful skill, exercising or
edifying yourself with literature, art or music. The same can be said of social media,
like other open-ended forms of entertainment, social media is designed and optimised to
consume your time.
If people came up to you all day asking for 20 bucks you’d tell them to get lost. But
people all day long come up to you weather in person or on the phone or via email or
even sms to ask for your time. And you just hand it on over. We must be devoted to living
for ourselves, at least most of the time. The person who says yes to everyone's requests
will soon find that they have no time of their own, and that they are living for other people,
not themselves. Those who are happy, fill their time with activities that are valuable
and meaningful to their own vision of his life.
9. Invest your time creating new memories
To quote Seneca “You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will
arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that”
If you give a rich man money, he will try to double his money by investing in places
where he will get maximum returns. Similarly, we should all invest our time wisely and the
best returns we can get with our time is by investing it in creating new memories and
in philosophies. Seneca tells us that memory is more enduring than grief. We spend too
much of our time in chasing that makes our short life shorter like luxuries, leisure
so that once we get old, we regret not living at all. “One of the enemies of happiness
is adaptation,” says Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University
who has been studying the question of money and happiness for over two decades. Gilovich
and other researchers have found that memories from life experiences—as fleeting as they
may be—deliver more lasting happiness than things. Memories guide our thoughts, actions
and decisions – they shape who we are. You can start creating new memories by taking
on new challenges, by spending time with people you love, travelling, seeking new opportunities.
Buying an Apple Watch isn’t gonna to change who you are; taking a break from work to hike
the Appalachian Trail from start to finish most certainly will. We are not our possessions,
but we are the accumulation of everything we’ve seen, the things we’ve done, and
the places we’ve been.
10. Invest your time in philosophies In our final piece of wisdom from Seneca for
this video we learn “Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy,
only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes,
but they annex every age to theirs. All the years that have passed before them are added
to their own”. Seneca points to the study of philosophy as
the only worthwhile occupation of the mind and spirit - an invaluable teacher that helps
us learn how to inhabit our own selves fully in this “brief and transient spell” of
existence and expands our short lives sideways, so that we may live wide rather than long.
Philosopher means lover of wisdom”. Philosophy is a study of truth, virtue, life and death.
Nothing in this world is permanent except the truth. The philosopher will always seek
to discover the truth of the way this world is and what our role is within it. You can
start with reading. Good books have been written in the service of you. The knowledge and wisdom
they hold is condensed time and that time compressed into their pages adds to your time.
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