Time Anxiety: The Illusion of Urgency and a Better Way to Live
In Time Anxiety, author and entrepreneur Chris Guillebeau explores how we perceive and manage our time, prompting readers to reassess their relationship with time in unexpected ways.
Time Anxiety: The Illusion of Urgency and a Better Way to Live by Chris Guillebeau, published by Crown Currency
It always feels like there’s never enough time. We wake up late, we work overtime, we feel exhausted, and we decide to go right to sleep rather than doing something productive when we get home. We say we’re going to wake up early the next day, but when our alarm sounds, we instinctively hit snooze. We wait until the last second to send that email or plan that trip. We get caught up in the whirlwind of life and forget to return friends’ calls, feeling guilty for not having done it earlier. We never get around to working on that creative project we’ve been talking about for years, but we’re trying, we’re really trying!
Why is it that there never seems to be enough time in the day? We attempt to follow the routines of celebrities, influencers, and successful businesspeople, but their rigid schedules never seem to work for us. What can we do? How can we manage our time better?
Time Anxiety: The Illusion of Urgency and a Better Way to Live is a jam-packed, informative, radical cover-to-cover journey that will have you reevaluating your relationship with the clock in ways you’ve never thought of before. Through his conversational writing style and honest tone, Chris Guillebeau guides the reader through his own tips and tricks on how to radically change your mindset when it comes to thinking about time and how to fight back against the dreaded feeling of time anxiety.
Time anxiety, as Guillebeau defines it, is that feeling you get when you’re anxious and overwhelmed about the amount of time passing you by. It may come in the form of feeling like you’re not doing enough or being so overwhelmed by all the things that you have to do, you choose to just do nothing at all. However time anxiety manifests, it leaves a person feeling drained, hopeless, and worried about the time they believe they are wasting. But, as Guillebeau sees it, this “wasted time” is nothing more than a misinformed belief.
Taking the reader through the three sections of this book – Breaking the Cycle, Rewriting Time Rules, and Owning Your Time – Guillebeau deconstructs previously held beliefs of time and urges the reader to put themselves and their desires in life first. He encourages us to think of time rules as existing to serve us rather than us existing to serve time rules. He challenges the reader to think about things they commit to that they find no joy in and to stop doing these things without a second thought. He calls out phony “time management” tricks we learn that do little more than cover up the problem, like waking up earlier and micro-managing every minute of our days.
In a twist that really surprised me, he tells the reader that it’s okay to do most things in life poorly, to not stress over little tasks and instead preserve your energy for the projects that really matter. Instead of encouraging us to do the most we can with our time and always leave our best mark on everything we touch, Guillebeau challenges the reader to think about what really matters and what they really care about.
Guillebeau gives it to the reader straight: the truth is, you will never be able to beat time. You will never be able to manipulate it in a way where you are able to achieve all of your goals. You will never be able to optimize every second of every day. You will not beat time, because someday, we will all run out of it when we die. A tad bit pessimistic, but this kind of radical acceptance, Guillebeau argues, is the first step to freeing yourself from time anxiety. If you accept that you will never have total control over your time, you can start focusing on the things you actually can do: taking time for yourself during busy work weeks. Not viewing relaxation and pursuing non-lucrative hobbies as fruitless. Setting long-term goals rather than obsessing over finishing your to-do list in one day. By letting go of trying to control time, you are able to focus on the time that’s at your disposal now and work incrementally towards your passions and goals.
Wrestling with the truth of time is not an easy feat. It’s an uncomfortable reality that many of us like to ignore, but the truth always makes itself known one way or another. Time is running out, yes. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have any left. We don’t have to let our fear of losing time stop us from effectively and purposefully using the time we have now. As Guillebeau eloquently put it at the end of Time Anxiety: “Truly, there is time for a life well-lived. If you’re reading this now, there’s still time.”
