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“100 years, 5200 weeks, 3 billion heartbeats.
With optimistic calculations (and a lucky guess) we could have that much time. Life is not necessarily short, we just often waste part of it. In our daily lives, we hardly realise that time is one of our most precious resources: it is limited and dwindling.

But if we manage it well, we can fit anything in*.
Anything but everything: you can be anything but everything – you can learn anything in the world but not everything. You can have time for anything, but not everything.
Life is not short, but time wasted is a lot.
In today’s world, there is so much noise, so much unnecessary – and often false – information, so many never-ending series of meetings, so many projects, so many advertisements and commercials competing for our attention, stimulating our dopamine pathways, that we don’t even notice what really matters.
In planning my time and energy, I no longer just take into account what I need to do, but also what I won’t do.

If we don’t allocate our time and prioritise, someone else will do it for us: the phone buzzes 0-24, the notifications of meeting invitations and reminder emails beep, the colour-smelling adverts and announcements flicker in our faces, and all the while our never-ending TODO list grows.

The only way to escape this negative spiral was to plan and measure every hour of my 2022*. No details, on the order of magnitude of some activity time requirements:
~2890 hours of sleep,
~800 hours of reading (70+ books, ~25,000 pages),
~570 hours of running training (3670 km run, +129 hours of stretching, +104 hours of strengthening),
~152 hours of podcast listening,
~2000 hours of work,
~1700 hours of eat-drink-leisure-travel and time with family/friends,
~300 hours of spontaneous activity (good news for the skeptics, even this kind of planning-measuring-scheduling won’t kill the spontaneity of life, as it still adds hundreds of hours of ‘random other activity’ to the equation. In 2023 I will try to eliminate this by even more precise planning and measuring.)

By the end of 2022, I could only accept (after seeing the ‘statements’) that if I said yes to something, I said no to a lot of other things at the same time – it can’t fit in everything, everywhere, all the time. This is why our time and attention is so precious.

Also, a big lesson for me was that without a plan, we will only do random activities and, not too surprisingly, we will achieve random results: in sport, at work, in studies, and pretty much in any area of life.
But planning alone is not enough: measuring (what you don’t measure, you can’t improve) and execution also matter: we brainstorm, we dream, but after a while we have to get up from the drawing board and start implementing.
This is where the momentum often runs out. This is where dreams come to rest.

But time inexorably passes.

I don’t remind myself of this every day (‘memento mori’) to be anxious about the passing of time, but on the contrary: to feel the weight and significance of each hour, day, year.
For me, the unbearably painful fact of the passing of time can almost only be relieved by running (or more precisely, by the flow experience of running).
For minutes, for hours – as long as the miles last, as long as the flow lasts.
But the flow ends; the miles ‘run out’, the race is over. And all that is left is to return from the timeless, cloudless, almost transcendent state to the ‘real world’ where our time cannot last forever.
It is our own responsibility with whom and with what activities we spend our allotted ‘time’.
When the ‘time comes’, do we feel regret or satisfaction:
Have we done all we were capable of doing in our lifetime?

100 years, 5200 weeks, 3 billion heartbeats.
The clock is ticking.”