On the Shortness of a Day

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Mar 31, 2023 · 7 min read

Life is Short

“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. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”

– Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Seneca famously wrote this in his treatise On the Shortness of Life. We’ve heard it said many times before in some form or another: “life is short”, “you only live once”, “the biggest mistake you can make is thinking you have time”, etc. Seneca certainly had some great insights on life, however, when I think of all I want to achieve in my lifetime and where I should be investing my time I can feel overwhelmed. Perhaps you feel the same…

Sometimes I wonder whether or not I’m spending my time properly. Should I be working every single waking moment of my life towards my goals? Or do I need to take ample time off to let my creativity run free? That’s nearly impossible to answer because I don’t really know how I’ve used life, until I’ve lived a lifetime. And a lifetime is such an incomprehensible time-span that it’s quite difficult to gauge whether or not I’m actually spending it meaningfully.

In this article I want to discuss a different metric for measuring whether or not you’re spending life properly. I want to shift focus away from thinking about life as something short or long based on how we use it, towards something a bit more manageable: a collection of days.

The Day

So a lifetime is too long to comprehend. What about a year? Nope, still too long. Even a month or a week is too long for my brain to really understand. But what about a day? A day is something I can wrap my head around. A day is easy to understand: the sun comes up, it goes down, it’s very simple. Let’s break down the numbers:

According to the CDC, the average life expectancy in the United States is 76.4 years. That’s 916.8 months, or 3,972.8 weeks, or 27,886 days. That’s all we get – 27,886 days.

Seneca said life is long if we know how to use it, but what does that really mean? To me knowing how to use life means knowing how to spend a day. If you can spend close to each and every day doing at least one thing that makes you happy, you’ll accumulate months and years of good investments, which eventually translate to a life well spent. By thinking of life as just a collection of days, we are left to focus on the present day. We can fully immerse ourselves into that brief moment of our life we actually have control over. We can not predict the future, nor can we change the past, the only thing we actually have power over is what we chose to do today.

There’s another added benefit to thinking of life in this way and that’s that each new day becomes the beginning of the rest of your life. This idea is becoming rather trite nowadays, but essentially it says we’re not bound by our past. The only thing that defines us is who we decide to be today. All too often I’ve beaten myself up over thinking it’s too late to do something I love. But ruminating over my past isn’t going to change my future. I have the choice to be 10 or 20 years older and still not do what I love, or I can start now and actually enjoy those 10 to 20 years’ worth of days.

How I Organize a Day

In a quote often attributed to Bill Gates, he says, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years”. I want to extend this idea to say most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year.

Once you start to play with the idea that life is just a collection of many days, you start to see a day as something more than just a period of 24 hours. It becomes one of the most easily understood natural constructs of time, a stepping stone for you to reach those gargantuan life goals we all hope to one day achieve. With that said, here is my framework for making the most out of one day. 

Every day I try to identify just one or two things I want to get done. That’s it! If I try any more, I might get overwhelmed, not know where to start, and end up not doing anything. That’s an example of that overconfidence Gates mentioned. My goal is not to get a lot done in one day, but to get a little bit done every single day. We might not realize it at first but those things add up:

• Picture this, you have 10 things you want to do and you decide to try and tackle them all at once to get it out of the way. After finishing 4 of those goals you’re burnt-out and utterly exhausted. You give up, you feel like a failure, and it’s unlikely you will try to finish those remaining 6 tasks anytime soon.
• Now instead imagine you decide to do only 2 tasks each day. You get it done easily. While you could do more, you remind yourself you’ve reached your goal for the day. Now you’re free to have fun or relax! Tomorrow comes and again you crush two tasks. The pattern continues until day 5 when you’ve finished all your tasks, but hold on, you’re not tired or burnt out. Now you can tackle even more of your goals, or take some time off knowing you’ve accomplished everything you set out to do. You feel like a winner!

The reason I like to break things up into a day is because it’s such a manageable and comprehensible chunk of time. Instead of setting goals that take a lifetime to achieve, break them up into smaller goals. This will keep you feeling like you’re making progress and keep you motivated to keep going.

Finally, don’t beat yourself up over not finishing everything you set out to do in a day. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

Conclusion

We all have the same number of hours in a day to play with. It’s how we spend that time that makes all the difference, so go make the most out of your 27,886 days. After a lifetime of good days, you’ll look back and realize what a memorable collection you’ve built.

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