There’s that classic meme (that feels weird to say – memes have been along that long!) with a quote that seems to be by Jaden Wilkes though with the Internet these days it’s hard to say. It goes something like this:
“There are two wolves battling inside of you, one is fear and one is love. The wolf that survives depends on which one you decide to feed.”
Which, of course, because of the nature of the Internet has expanded to describe any battling impulses in your mind. For me, as those who have followed me online for any of the past 30 years or so knows, my two wolves are called regimentation and chaos which in my less helpful moments I describe as “Freedom.” I get in my best physical and mental space when I am organized about how I spend my time. I regularly get out to exercise and my cycling stamina increases. I meditate every day and my mood improves, I cook new things and I have more fun. But then there’s a point where that other wolf rebels against that. “Oh that jerk just wants to tell us what to do with every single minute of our day, what to eat, how much coffee to drink, when to wake up and when to go to sleep. When do we get to have fun?” Often that’s the first shot in a battle that ends with a few weeks or months of them running the show. Anyone on the same train as me yesterday afternoon knows what that looks like. I was sleepy for lack of exercise, decent sleep and a habit of too much coffee. I was also grumpy because I had budgeted my time poorly and felt like the rest of my night would be spent busily updating a resume, ticking tasks off my task list and making dinner as well. That was just that second wolf mad that he’d set me up poorly and saw there was likely no way to get out of at least a little regimentation that night as all of those tasks had to be done.
So today after a few weeks, or really a whole winter of this wolf running the show Sage and I sat down to sort out the power hand-off to the diligent wolf. The first step was to figure out how much time I had to work with. In March if I woke at 6AM and was in bed by 10PM, I’d have about 496 hours. 220 of those would be devoted to getting ready for, going to, and coming home from work. Then we started pulling together all the remaining hours: 2 hours/week for grocery shopping, cooking dinner 3 days/week (2 hours with prep, cleanup, etc), 8-10 hours/week of cycling training, 28 hours getting to/from volunteering and actually doing it, 22.5 hours of Hindi classes, 20 min/day of meditation, and 30 min/day reading for fun. Even with all that it left me with around 170 hours left or roughly 42 hours per week. I could almost take on another full time job with the time I hadn’t allocated. Some of that will for sure be used for leisure – watching Taskmaster or playing a video game. But there’s still a ton left.
The point of this exercise was, in part, to figure out where I stood. How busy am I really? But instead, what it found showed me was that my challenge right now isnot that I don’t have time. I have lots of time. I do a really poor job of scheduling things. Procrastinate on necessary tasks and they will pile up all on the same day making that day feel like hectic and waking up chaos wolf. So off to the calendar I went to start locking in those important times:
In went the fixed times – Hindi classes are always weekend mornings, my work starts on weekday mornings when I wake up (getting ready and commuting is included in that budget) and ends around 5pm. Volunteering happens Monday and Friday nights right after work and goes for most of the evening. Those are not available for exercise or cooking dinner at home. But that also means I have five days where I can get on my bike. If I want to do a long bike ride every week, I’d do well to avoid scheduling it on the day when I intend to go grocery shopping – so Saturday is for shopping, and longer rides happen on Sundays.
The next step is to address the “time leaks” in the system. A time leak is something that I tell myself is just going to be for a minute but ends up eating a long time. For example, back in 1995 I had a 90 minute drive to work at a client site near New York City. Leaving at rush hour was pointless as it took longer so if I left at 5:30 I might get home at 7:45 but if I left at 6:30 I might get home at 8. So many of us would just sit around the office. Around that time my boss got a copy of the first person shooter game Doom and we had loaded it on all of our office PCs in the construction trailer where we worked. After work we’d play “just for a few minutes” to kill time between when we were done working and when traffic was better. But invariably we’d completely lose track of time and might leave at 7:30 or later. It didn’t help that none of us looked forward to fighting NYC traffic so we played just one more minute for hours. We had a time leak in our system. That leak was never closed until the project ended.
Now social media is a time leak and instead of avoiding starting a commute it’s often a matter of avoiding starting cooking dinner or getting ready for work. So this month I’m adding screen time locks to slowly reduce social media time – mostly reels. I’ll ramp this slowly down.
In the past this plugging of time leaks and scheduling meaningful tasks in a calendar set in stone has made a huge difference. In 2016 I could run over 20 km in a session, in 2024 I could ride a bike well over 200 km in a day. In nearly every day of 2020 I went outside to run or ride nearly every single day, and even went over 18 months without using a motor vehicle – including transit. At the same time I remember feeling my absolute best and somehow having time not only for all of those things but loads of work, cooking new dishes and writing and posting about all of it. Surprisingly the more I schedule the more I get done.
As I write this I’m realizing – in reality it’s no different from budgeting money. If you, as we did for many years, just spend money using the bank balance as an indicator of where you are, you’re going to come up short and likely have less as you deal with many small financial “leaks” as we did. (We ate SO MANY DELIVERED PIZZAS from 1992-1997 – no doubt many because I arrived home too late to cook dinner after playing Doom after work).
The same seems to be true for time. If you use the clock and calendar to see where you are and if you have time for something you’re going to lose time to “leaks”. If you have a time budget and scheduled “payments” then you’d be surprised at how much you can get done.
At least that’s my theory as I look at a full calendar that I’m likely to fill with more things including budgeted “free time” (just as we have a dining out budget now). But let’s see together how this goes throughout the month of March. (There’s time budgeted for writing these entries on Sundays now)
And what will I do with all of this extra time? I haven’t allocated all of it but I’ll give you one peek into the future. 2026 will be the year in which I will ride my bike 300 kilometres in one day.
