thoughts on time

Being alive takes time.

We do things quickly—not better, but quickly—to gain time. But what’s the point if in the time we gain we just do more things quickly? I have yet to meet someone who wants their headstone to read, “He rushed.”

meaningful productivity often comes not from hurrying things up but from letting them take the time they take, surrendering to what in German has been called Eigenzeit, or the time inherent to a process itself.

Chamath on the importance of slow compounding:

“The faster you build it, that is the half life: it will get destroyed in the same amount of time.”

Things tend to come and go, tip to one side and then the other, tide out and back in, grow and then rot, get created and destroyed, at the same speed.

Time is the best editor.

If you have it, time is the easiest trick for self-editing. Simply put your work away long enough so when you come back to it you can see it with fresh eyes.

one hour per week spent making the planet a better place, and the rest having fun, is preferable to eight hours per day spent angrily or anxiously thinking about how things ought to be different.

Oliver Burkeman

Even outside of work, you are proposing to consume people’s most precious resource: time. Making the effort to consider how you want your guests, and yourself, to be altered by the experience is what you owe people as a good steward of that resource.

There is a kind of clock of fertility that many women are aware of, and mine is a kind of Schrödinger’s clock. It is possible, for example, that my clock has already run out, and it is too late for me to use my body to make a child. Or it is possible my clock is still ticking along. The fact of my not knowing used to be a thing that plunged me into