How To Manage Your Time - Seneca (Stoicism)

Lucius Emmaus 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-renewable 'ti 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 number one treat time as a commodity Seneca says people are frugal in guarding their personal property but as soon

as it comes to squandering time their most wasteful of the one thing in which it's 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 really rich guy just throwing his money away you definitely think 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 the

money because unlike money we can't make anymore when it runs out to realize the value of one year ask a student who fail the 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 got

silver at the Olympics while the amount of time we get on this earth is uncertain the one thing that is certain is that that time is limited money and property can increase and decrease depending on our 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 number two 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're so busy

and worried about the future that we often let the present slip away allowing time to rush past unobserved and uncie's and then when we are old and on our death beds we finally realize how short and valuable life is left with the 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're in the middle of a desert dying of thirst and you came across a stream of water but you're not sure when it might stop wouldn't you drink as much of it

as you possibly could just like water we should use as much of our time as possible in 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 at once so choose to live in the moment number three 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 the majority of us don't even come close to achieving many of these things because we're 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 ourselves 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 ourselves 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'll spend your life working to make someone else's dream a reality number four practice premeditate Oh 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 the Seneca gives us a way to fight this with

a very effective and simple method the Stoics called it premeditate Oh 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 of 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 Ilia of short-term impulses ahead of time if you prepare yourself by a shed you willing ahead whatever it is you want done you're 2 to 3 times

more likely to follow through number 5 make long-term rewards immediate to quote Seneca cutting 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 a.m. as you'd planned to your brain the allure of funding 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 long-term reward the reason that it often so hard to start something is that there's 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 number six make the most of your free time as we learn from Seneca it's 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 eight to nine 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 coworkers 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 working at your day job keep time spent working at a minimum you'll never get those overtime hours back they're 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 a gallery maybe start an office reading group that can meet up at lunch times on weekends or on evenings when you've got ample free time make the most of it by meditating reading exercising or journaling or anything that could add 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 number seven spend time reflecting on your past Seneca informs us that life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past let 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've 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 number eight 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 staring at screens either for work or on social media trawling through yet more status updates and posting endless selfies how often are we caught in giving up our time to others for nothing more than the pursuit of monetary or 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 optimized 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 whether 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've no time of their own and that they're 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 life number 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'll try to double it by investing in places where he'll 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 which makes our short lives shorter like luxuries and 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's been studying the question of money and happiness for over two decades in 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 traveling and sinking new opportunities buying an Apple watch isn't gonna 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 number 10 invest your time in philosophies in our final piece of wisdom

from Seneca for this video we learn of all people only those who 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's 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 add to your time if you enjoyed this video please do

make sure to check out our complete stoicism playlist and for more videos to help you find success and happiness using ancient philosophical wisdom don't forget to subscribe thanks so much for watching you