1,440

That’s how much time we have to spend each day.

Time is a truly scarce resource. You can beg, borrow, and steal money but a minute spent has gone for good. Each day, you have a time bank account with 1,440 minutes in it. Each day that account goes back to zero again, with no borrowing or saving. Put bluntly but accurately, you are getting ever closer to death.¹

‘This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time’², as the saying goes.

There’s danger in prioritising quantity over quality, when it comes to time, however.

A colleague of mine thought that a consequence of thinking about happiness over time was that happiness levels would go up when waking hours go up because you have more time to be happy. But you would then also have more time to be tired and miserable, too. Happiness is not only about the quantity of time (though that matters) but also about its quality. As someone who does not sleep too well, I would be happier overall during my waking hours if one more of my hours overall were spent sleeping.³

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1. Dolan, P. (2014). Happiness by design: Change what you do, not how you think. New York: Hudson.
2. Palahniuk, C. (1996). Fight club. New York: Norton.
3. Dolan, 2014.