Why You Never Have Enough Time

80% of Americans today say that they are time-starved. And despite having more tools available to make more use of our time than we've ever had, what's going on with that?

Take that statistic. Oh, we think that we are time-starved. And don't get me wrong, I think there's truth to it. But today, screens generally are like— I think it's somewhere between 6 and 8 hours a day generally. And, you know, that's not all productive work. It's Instagram and everybody complains about it. So how is it that we're time-starved and yet we can spend 5 hours a day in entertainment? Netflix and Apple, Instagram and like—

or writing Instagram posts about how time-starved we are, right?

Yeah. Or another way to think about this, which I think is a kind of cool way to think about it, most of us now have figured out some way to save time with AI. But nobody's ever— nobody feels like they have their time back. I got my time back. I had AI do the outline.

That I had my washing machine wash my clothes, that I had the dishwasher wash my dishes.

Exactly. I was in a company where we're implementing this thing called 5-Star Meetings, and 5-Star Meetings is basically a way to make sure all of your meetings are really great. And the more people implement it, what happens is people spend less time in meetings because the meetings that you have are really good and you stop doing the ones that aren't good and you find other replacements. And so, so I'm sitting there and every single executive around this table says to me that they have saved a tremendous amount of time. They're not going to all these meetings, right? Because they like— may— maybe it's like 2 to 3 hours a week, but most of the cases it's like 6 or 7 hours a week they're saving and not going to certain meetings, not being in meetings. And then You know, 20, 30 minutes later, we're talking about the investment we have to make to get 5-Star Meetings more widely integrated into the company, how to make it more powerful. And somebody said, yeah, but we have to understand how busy we are. We can't just like, where are we going to get the time for this? And I looked at the person, I was like, hey, you just told me you save 7 hours a week. What are you talking about? And when you looked at his face, it wasn't shame that he had just been like called out or something like that. It was literally like he, he was trying to figure out how he could do that.

How he had— how he did what? How he had—

how he could not see that all that extra time was available to him. How he saved all that time and yet he still felt that busy, yet he still felt that much time scarcity. And you could see it. He was He's like, oh yeah, oh yeah, of course we have time to do this because it'll save me more time. But it was literally the mindset, the definition was, oh, I don't have enough time.

This week on The Art of Accomplishment, we're going to talk about why you don't have enough time. We're gonna talk about what time scarcity is, where it comes from, and what you can do about it in your life.

What I see is what's really happening is that it's usually almost always about emotional overwhelm. So practically, I'm a parent, I have a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old, and I feel like I never have enough time to get them to school. So I'm in the car, oh my gosh, I'm rushing, I'm going, there's not enough time. I'm overwhelmed in that place. There's emotional overwhelm in that. And then I go through my day, everything, and then at night I feel all this emotional overwhelm. I don't wanna feel it, so I scroll. Maybe I scroll too late. Maybe I don't get enough sleep. Maybe I wake up late. Maybe now I'm rushing again and I don't have enough time again. So there's a practical way in which when we're sitting there scrolling and beating ourselves up for scrolling, as an example, there's lots of other ways that we do this, we have apparently hours, but 4 hours before, 6 hours before, we didn't have enough time to get the job done.

Yeah.

The more sense of urgency that we have, like, oh my gosh, I have to get something done. And particularly urgency is not the urgency that you have, say, in a pickleball game or a basketball game where you are rushing to the net and there's an urgency there, but it doesn't have that kind of stress that time scarcity has.

Yeah, you're actually outside of time. You're just in the— You're in the moment right there.

You're just moving.

Yeah, that's a great way to say it. Yeah.

Because we're present.

Yeah.

But in that time scarcity thing, what we are is we're in the future. And so that's the other big component of time scarcity is that we are in the future. We're thinking about what we have to do next. We're thinking about, oh, we have one more podcast to record today. I have this other thing to happen. And so we jump into our phone because there we're not thinking about the future. Ah, relief. I don't have to think about the future. And so what is time scarcity really? On some level, it's emotional overwhelm. And the other thing is, is just not being present. Is being in the future. It's thinking about the tasks that you have to do while you're doing another task, which is insanely stressful to tell yourself you have to do something while you're doing something.

Right. I'm remembering back to about an hour ago where we were like, okay, we're doing 4 episodes today. This next one is going to be time scarcity. We're going to talk about it over lunch and we're going to come back and we're going to record it. But we come back and we talk through it and suddenly you're like, okay, cool, I'm going to take a nap for 20 minutes and I'll come back. I was like, actually, I'm tired too. I'm going to take a nap. So yeah, you, me, and Mun all took a nap.

Yeah.

And then woke back up and here we are recording.

We all woke up with less time to do the recordings and also not with time scarcity, not without that, with that sense of like, oh my God, urgency. There is more urgency before we took the nap than there was after we took the nap. Yeah, we had less time.

Yeah. So we've established that the sense of time scarcity is almost always, most of the time, not about the actual amount of time that you have, but just about emotional overwhelm. Let's dive in a little bit more into the emotional overwhelm.

Yeah.

How does that— how does that work?

Time scarcity is almost always a response to stress. And stress, we like to think, is that we have too many things to do. And not enough time. But stress is often about not feeling our emotions, because right now, if I say to you, stop feeling all of your emotions, you have to constrict your body, you have to constrict muscles, and it's stressful. That's incredibly stressful. Telling yourself that you have to be doing something, being constantly under attack in your head, especially do something that you can't do, like, oh, you're driving your kid to school, but you're also thinking about the fact that you have to get the carpets cleaned and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you can't do it because you're driving your kid to school in that moment. That's also stressful. So that negative self-talk is also stress. And so as we're doing those things that are creating stress for us, one of the things that pops out of that is this idea of time scarcity. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Particularly when we're using any kind of stress that puts us out of the present. So even using something like connection, something that we teach in the Connection Course, the more connected you feel, the less time scarcity you feel.

So the emotional— When you're chasing the pickleball, you're feeling really connected to that moment. And even if your laundry is undone, right? It doesn't matter.

Exactly. As a matter of fact, the reason I feel present and not that time urgency in pickleball even though I'm rushing, I'm running as fast as I can, is because I can't in that moment think about anything but what's happening right now.

Yeah.

And so that's the other piece of it is that flow states is when we lose track of time. And that time scarcity is when we're actually aware of time. And we know through plenty of studies that flow states are more productive. We know we get more done that way. We know that when we're thinking about time and managing time, and thinking about the future, we do not get our jobs done as well. I was just in a meeting the other day and someone was like, "Oh, great, AI researcher doesn't even know what day of the week it is." You could say that about an artist. You could say that about a programmer. You could say that about anybody who's like fully in flow state on their creation. And when we're in those states, we don't feel that time urgency. We feel the time urgency when we are not present in the thing that we're doing. Which is also a great way to describe society. So if you think of that, 80% of society feels time scarcity, you could just also say 80% of the— of society is not— yeah, is not present most of their time.

Yeah, it's more of a diagnostic. Yeah, if you're feeling the time scarcity, or if you're feeling time-starved, it may just be a sign that you haven't taken the time, right, or the presence to be with what you, with what's really going on for you.

Yeah.

And so you've outpaced yourself, you've outrun yourself, and you're trying to catch up. On like an intellectual level or on—

Yes, that's right.

But on an emotional level, you haven't been there for something.

Yeah. And the other thing about the emotional overwhelm, I think in particular that's interesting is there's short-term emotional overwhelm. I'm not going to feel that thing. And that creates some stress in my system. But there's the long-term emotional overwhelm as well. And what happens is the angst grows. And then you need more and more things to avoid the angst.

Mm.

And then the more you avoid it, the more the angst grows, you know? And so this thing compounds. It's like a bank account of emotional debt. Like it's a credit card of emotional debt.

Yeah.

And you're just like, oh, and the— and it just starts building and building and building. The funny thing is we tell ourselves we need a long time. We— oh, I have a whole— this emotional debt, so I'm going to go handle it. And sometimes it just needs like a 10-minute cry.

Yeah. Yeah, that reminds me of a conversation I was having with my wife Alexa last week while we were walking. We were talking about the experiences that both of us have had with ADD or with like attention management.

Yeah.

And there was a recognition like, oh, what I experience as ADD is essentially I'm so conscious of time that I'm not living in time.

Oh wow. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that totally makes sense.

Yeah. And what it really tracks for me is, is there something in me that is calling out for my attention that I'm not giving it? Some emotional process, some emotional— and there's a symmetry in what you were saying with this, like, acute and chronic different versions of the emotional overwhelm. And there's a couple different ways people talk about time starvation, time scarcity, which is, there's one which is there's just not enough time in the day to do all the things I wanna do in general. And then there's another one which is I'm late to the thing, I'm behind on the thing, and that seems like it's more acute. Can you speak to any distinction that you might see between those two modes?

Yeah, it's interesting because, so for instance, my particular lifestyle is I am extremely busy and I never feel like I don't have enough time for my kids or, I always make time for the thing that's most important to me. And so I never feel that way, even though if I had twice as much time, I could do twice as much. So it's like, it's such a strange— I don't, but I don't, I don't buy into that. Where I will buy in is, oh, I have to hurry this up and get the meeting done. Right. Which is particularly weird when you think about how time dilation works in the fact that oftentimes if you give yourself 45 minutes to do a meeting, you'll get the same thing done that you would have in an hour meeting. And I know there's some principle that they named that, that we can put in the show notes.

Parkinson's Law.

Okay, that would be cool. And so there is some sort of weird thing to that, but I will be hurrying through a meeting. That's where I will feel like that lack of time that's available. So in the time The short term, it's very much the things that we've been talking about, which is I need to get this thing done right now, is I'm in the future. Whether I'm in trying to get to the end of the meeting, I'm thinking about the end of the meeting, or whether I am thinking about the next task I have to do, it's very much about not being present in the moment. Whereas when I'm thinking about it long term, I'm not doing stuff this week that will save me time in 6 months from now. So you're running around in urgency where your amygdala is firing, where you're in in fear where you're not going to make as good decisions, where you're not going to learn as quickly. And the sacrifice is a decision that can literally save you years. And so, so there's a whole thing about getting time to work for you instead of you working for time. There's also, especially looking backwards, which is where a lot of that long-term stuff happens, which is far more grief-oriented. And the forward is far more fear-oriented. I don't have enough time is a very urgent right now thing. I didn't have enough time for my kids. Looking backwards, it's very grief.

Yeah. Yeah, so if you move that grief and you move that fear, those are the things that are keeping your awareness from being here right now to being with the unprocessed grief in the past. Like, oh, I'm dropping all these balls. I'm not there for my kids. I'm not there for my family. I'm not there for my business. I'm not there in the ways that I, want to be, and now I feel behind.

Right.

And then the forward-looking fear of how I'm going to feel if this state continues or gets worse.

Yeah.

Rather than just feeling, oh yeah, I'm living one life, I'm one human, this is the journey that I'm on, this is where I am right now, this is what's here.

Yeah, I just noticed that as you're talking, yeah, there's a sadness that comes over me. Because on some level, it's like with time urgency, we're trading our life in the moment for an outcome that never really shows up.

Or a false promise. Yeah, that if I stress about time right now, somehow that'll lead to what I want more, more than just being here with what's—

which is crazy when you think about the fact that, uh, the more of— affluent people, people with more money have more time urgency in their mind, but they have more resources to get other people to do stuff for them.

Right. And you can feel just as oppressed by having an assistant and having a team that suddenly you don't have enough time to delegate everything anymore.

Exactly. And yeah, and that's an amazing thing too, is that like, I think a lot of people, I think I did for years and years and years, felt very oppressed by time. And I remember listening to this podcast and it was Radio Lab, and they talked about time and how time had changed. How before clocks, time was done, you know, "Hey, come home when the birds chirp." You know, when this bird is chirping, that's when you're supposed to come home. Or when this, you know, there's this natural rhythm to time. And then there was this moment of time where time was railroad time. You needed a clock to catch the train, and then the train needed the time to be the same in all the places so that there could be a schedule. And so then there became these— like, a town used to have a time. And apparently, according to the podcast, when people were like, okay, well, you know, St. Louis doesn't have St. Louis time anymore, there's going to be a time for like the whole Midwest or whatever, people rebelled. People got upset. Like there was like protests over the fact that— just imagine that. You're like, no, you're not taking away our time.

Yeah.

And I just think about, right, if we took away clocks, if there was no such thing as you have to be here at 5 o'clock, like then what would we put all this urgency on? Like, where would we put it? Because people lived without that concept for years and years and years, and we're living with it as if it's real. But it's, it's really not real, which is a fascinating— it's, we're just describing a reality and then we, we bound ourselves to it, we chained ourselves to it. And, and I remember this moment where I was at a, um, I was at a retreat and like time inverted in my mind for the first time. And it's very hard to describe it, but it was, oh, I've been working for time I am, I am acting in the way that what time wants from me, but time could actually work for me. And that's when, when I started thinking about time management completely different. All of a sudden, my task list wasn't things that I had to do in a certain amount of time. My task list was, what are the 3 things that I can do that will take this whole task list away? Or what's the thing that I can do today that will save me a lot of time? Next month? Like, how do I plant a seed? Right?

If I just plant a time seed, I like that.

Yeah. Or literally, it's like planting a seed. I can either run around trying to forage food all day, or I can plant a seed. And in 3 months, I just— I don't have to run around the forest. I can just pick. So it's like, literally, what are the things that I can do in the business today that will save me time in the future? And a perfect example of this is raising kids. Or raising a dog. Upfront work, little, little work upfront saves you a tremendous amount of time on that back end. You know, taking that time with somebody and feeling connected with them saves you a lot of time on the back end. Most people aren't even thinking about money investment, but some people are thinking about money investment in like, what can I do with my money today? So, so I have plenty of it in the future. What can I do with it?

Which might just be another way of saying, how can I make enough money to be able to use money to buy my time back later?

Right, exactly. But you can do the same thing with time. I have time. How much of it am I investing into the future? How much of the time am I investing into the present?

Right?

There is a, there's, that's another way to look at time. And I remember when it, when time flipped like that for me, I was like, oh wait, this is something that I can have work for me as much as I can be working for it. And it's an interesting thing to know now, you know, after venture capital and doing this, that I absolutely could retire today. I could definitely not have to work again for a day in my life. Am I— I won't have this, the lifestyle I have now. But to know, like, to have that reality come into, oh wait, I could have an incredibly simple life where I had all the time in the world. We're in a society where you can pull that stuff off. We can actually choose to, but to have a lot of time if you choose not to have a lot of stuff, if you choose to live simply and to have that recognition like, oh, I'm making a choice, right? When we have time scarcity, we don't feel a choice.

It's fascinating also how we can create so much time scarcity around creating space to not feel time scarcity, like work really, really hard to go on the vacation and then imagine that we will actually relax. And not feel stressed about everything we're gonna have to do when we get back. Like recently I had a meditation retreat planned. It was like a 7, 8-day meditation retreat. And Alexa and I recently moved. So we found a place, signed a lease, and all the way that the timing worked out is that we were gonna be moving right around the time when I had this retreat. And so I was like, okay, well, I can go to this meditation retreat. And the entire time I'm hanging out there, I'll be like, Hmm, somewhere out there, my wife has a broken foot, and there's no way she's going to not try to move from one house to another during this time.

No, she's not. She's definitely doing it.

And I'm going to be hanging out meditating with that, and then come back.

Yeah.

And have an experience of what I haven't done and what I have done. Or I can cancel my meditation retreat. And why not be I'm just as present with moving as I might be in the retreat. Why not bring that practice into the moving process? And so that's what I did.

Yeah.

And it turns out I had plenty of time to move as well as hang out with myself in that process. It was extremely meditative. And I don't know, like, yeah, I'm confused because I wasn't expecting to enjoy moving, right, so much. But I did because suddenly I was like, this is my intention. I'm doing my meditation retreat and I'm moving.

And you were focused on presence, right? Which is really the thing. Like, if you move the emotion so you don't have the overwhelm, you can be more present. If you exercise, which is a great saying that I think, I think it was the guy who did Virgin Atlantic or whatever, Virgin Records, Branson, who said the best time management is exercise. If you're exercising, you feel like it, creates more presence. Anything that you do that creates more presence creates less time urgency, or less time poverty, or whatever the word— scarcity. And so, so anything that you do around that— and your job was like, oh, I'm just going to be present in this experience, and all of a sudden plenty of time.

Yeah. And one thing I learned in that process also was that the tasks I was doing while moving were very short timeline, like very quick feedback loop.

Yes.

I move this box from here and I move it over there and now it's done and I can see that it's happened. Yeah. Which is very different from the very abstract form of work that many of us are embedded in in our daily life where we spin a plate and it comes back to us 6 months later. Right. And we're kind of holding on to something for that entire time.

This is a really important part too, right? Part of the emotional overwhelm is that we're holding a tremendous amount of things simultaneously because we don't close. Yeah, you know, so there's this natural rhythm, and there's been some research on this, but I think most of where I read about this was in— I think it was Lowen's work. Um, but basically it's like you take on an activity and you have to— you gather energy, you take on the activity, but then you need to— at the end of that activity, there is a period of they have different words for it, but I'm gonna call it, there's a period of integration, there's a period of rest. And if you do that, if you actually do that, you're far more recharged than if you just go from one thing to another, to another, to another.

There's a moment of satisfaction. Moment of satisfaction. Letting it land.

Letting the dopamine land, let that moment of satisfaction actually. So that rest and integration time is really important to not have open loops. I watch this all the time with executives. They're going from meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting, and oftentimes they're not taking the action that's necessary to make the meeting investment worthwhile. Right?

Yeah. How many meetings end with an action item that never gets done or checked in on?

Right, exactly, exactly. And, and you don't notice it because you're going from one meeting to another to another meeting without having any time to think or thought. And so that's another, like, like trick that I use is I do not do back-to-back meetings. It's— I do meetings and then I do the work around the meetings. Or, uh, one of the people in the council, what they do is they do their meeting and then they take 5 minutes at the end of the meeting, they assign whatever tasks, and then everybody actually just takes some actions towards it at the end of the meeting. They just like, all right, everybody, let's just take actions that we can take around the meeting right now. And so they literally like take 5 minutes so that they can integrate what happened in the meeting into the rest of their life. And I think it'd probably be even more effective is, and then you're just like, okay, everyone's just gonna hang out and rest for 5. That would probably, that 10 minutes would probably make you so much more productive. And it's the same thing, like whether you're working out, you need rest to recover the muscle stuff. Like we have this thing where, Integration and rest is a really important part of productivity, and most people forget about it.

So having the sense of time starvation, time scarcity, could also be diagnostic for the fact that you're not letting it, not letting yourself integrate, not letting yourself rest from between experiences.

Yeah, as a matter of fact, Bill Gates was apparently, you know, would take a week off every quarter to just be in the woods think and consider, call that integration, call it relaxation. I'll take the month of August off. I'll take multiple, like, 4-day silent retreats through, like, one a quarter outside of the month that I take the month off. I always come back with a feeling of I have plenty of time, and it's very hard for me to rush, and I'm not, right? Because I've actually had the time to integrate and incorporate what has happened for a while. And the further away I get from that, the more I notice that I, like, am likely to start feeling that urgency again.

Yeah. Okay, so what about somebody who has— let's just find an example where somebody absolutely can't do what we just described. Let's say they're in a trench in a war somewhere, or they are—

yeah, that's the amazing thing is people in a trench in a war zone actually do it better typically than everybody else.

Oh wow, that reminds me, actually, a friend of mine came back from— they were in Israel recently for work, and he came over. He was staying with us the other night, and he was describing how while he was hanging out in the bomb shelter, even though a building just a couple of buildings down from him got obliterated by a missile. Yeah. He realized that he felt less stressed than he did when he got back and started checking his email, because given the entire situation that was happening, he had permission to just slow down and stop and be present. Yeah. And nobody was expected to do anything. Yeah. Nobody's like the all the weight of the false urgency of daily life was just gone.

It was present. It's again, he's in that, he's in the same place that you were when you were jumping off of a cliff.

Right.

All I can do right now is be here, be present. And all of a sudden it's less stressful, which is insane when you think about it.

Right, and also incredible that you can track time so well in a moment where you have no identity, no ego, you're just connected to what's happening. And yet you have 5 seconds exactly to deploy a parachute. And that's a fascinating one, 'cause like there's the science of flow, like flow state. Yeah. Shows that people can keep track of time incredibly well under really high stress situations because they're just in flow.

Yeah. And you can track time better when you're not thinking about time, when you're present.

Right.

It's just awesome.

But also what was happening is my body was tracking something other than a concept of time. It wasn't tracking clock time. It was tracking something far more like what you were describing from the podcast that you mentioned, which was tracking something more like the moon or how long it takes to cook rice. Or, you know, I'm like watching the ground rush as I'm getting closer to the ground. And there's just a sense, there's a feeling, and it's related to what's happening, not related to what I think should be happening according to a timeline that I've constructed, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're in, you're in presence, and so, which is an amazing, right? So it makes sense that stress leads us out of the present, or being out of the present leads to stress and then creates just a lot of time scarcity.

Okay, so for somebody who's listening to this episode and they already didn't have enough time to listen to it to begin with. They clicked on it anyway.

Then they didn't get here. We don't have to answer their questions. Good.

What can somebody right now do as they finish up this podcast to address that overwhelm, to honor, to recognize, to Yeah, take 5 minutes every 2 hours, sit and do nothing.

Like, do absolutely nothing for 5 minutes every 2 hours.

I'm hearing people like, no, but I don't have the time, which reminds me of the saying, if you, if you don't have time to meditate for 20 minutes, meditate for an hour.

It also reminds me of the saying, which is, if you want something done, ask the busy person.

Oh yeah, right.

It's interesting how it's both, uh, what I can say is if you say that you don't have the time to spend 5 minutes every 2 hours, so let's say you're awake 16 hours, so that's 8 times 5, so that's 40 minutes. If you don't have time, then I'm assuming that you don't have time to do 40 minutes of Instagram, you don't have time to do 40 minutes of television, you don't have time to do 40 minutes of working out. Like, I don't believe it. I just don't believe that that's the case. And, and then I'll say, do that 5 minutes for one day. Like, carve out the 40 minutes somehow for one day and notice how much extra time you have. Because the thing is that there is that thing that's really important, which is this Slow, smooth, smooth is fast. It's the Marine Corps thing. It's— we've all been in that place where we're rushing out the door and we forget the keys, and then we rush back and get the keys, get back to the car, and then, oh shit, we forgot our wallet, go back and get the wallet. You know, there's the study that they did in the UK that during rush hour traffic, they had one person break all the rules and really rush, and the other person do all the rules, and the person who was rushing on the 60-mile commute, like, got there like 2 minutes or like a minute and a half faster. Right? And so what you're saying is that minute and a half is worth that amount of my life that I've just taken with all that stress and adrenaline and cortisol. Right? And, and so the brain does like convince us that we're saving time when we're actually not. And there's plenty of studies to show that that's what happens in our brain is our brain convinces us when we're in urgency that we're actually getting things done quicker when we're actually getting them done less well, right? And slower.

And, and if you sit down for those 5 minutes, you're probably going to initially rush through those 5 minutes the way you rush through everything else, right? Which is to think about the things you're going to do next. You might find yourself constricting and being like, okay, I'll hold still for 5 minutes, checking the box to get the thing done.

Yeah.

And that's the stance that is creating that situation in your entire life.

Yeah.

And in that same 5 minutes, you could scream, cry, feel the fear.

Yeah. You could be present with what is.

Enjoy yourself.

Exactly. It's just about being present. Yeah. And I think the other thing is that I think the place where this becomes most acute is the studies on multitasking are pretty clear that multitasking is not as effective as doing one thing at a time.

Or is it that it doesn't happen? You think you're multitasking.

Yeah, you think you're multitasking when you're not, but you're just like quickly going from one thing to another.

Yeah.

And then everything slows down. It's the same thing. Thing. Even if you're not multitasking by doing two things at once, you're multitasking by having your head two places at once, or having your head in a different place than your heart. Yeah, yeah. The real efficiency comes from doing just the thing you're doing.

Yeah, I'm noticing just a lot more presence right now having had this conversation, and it feels good. I think that's time for today.

Thank you.

Thank you, Joe.

Pleasure.

Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. Send it to somebody who think you would enjoy it. Somebody who thinks they don't have enough time to even listen to a podcast. Maybe, maybe that's the perfect target for this. And we'd love to hear your comments. You can comment on the YouTube videos, you can comment in the podcast apps, and you can find us on X at Art of a Comp. @fu_johudson and @erikistler. Till next time, take care.