A Journey in Time
Reflections on writing The Book on Time
By Ethan HawkesThe Book on Time: An Owner’s Manual for the Time of Your Life is a book that I never expected or initially felt qualified to write. Then the COVID-19 pandemic clobbered the travel start-up that I co-founded. Suddenly, I had a lot more unplanned time, anxiety, and unanswered questions about the future. The pain of this experience forced me to return to our company mission (to help people spend time in more meaningful and rewarding ways) for inspiration and clarity on the path forward.
After nine months largely confined to home going through ancient philosophy, modern scientific research, and deep reflection, I arrived at a far better understanding of how time well spent leads to a life well lived. I wrote down the key takeaways for myself but also in the hope that it helps others to think through many of life’s most important questions for themselves — and make the most of their limited time in life.
There’s nothing like a global pandemic to make us stop and realize that we shouldn’t take our day-to-day existence and even life itself for granted. Starting a travel company was more challenging than I expected, but the pandemic-induced challenges felt downright impossible. After a week during which we refunded over $1M for future bookings, and with no revenue in the foreseeable future, several advisors said it might be time to throw in the towel. Were they right? I wasn’t even sure how to begin thinking about whether to give up, persist, or pivot going forward.
The silver lining (if I squint hard) is that the pandemic forced a break from my normal routines and mindset — even if that break was initially unwelcome and government-mandated. I now had the time to step back and reflect. To decide how to move forward, I needed to examine whether I was wasting my (and our team’s) time or using it to pursue the most important and meaningful goals in life. What even were the right goals? How could I be sure? And even I arrived at clarity on truly worthwhile goals, what were the best ways to pursue them?
In search of answers and wisdom, I ditched late-night Netflix and binged on philosophy books of the supposed deepest thinkers through the ages. Here, I didn’t find much of the clarity that I longed to find. In fact, a lot of the purported wisdom still makes my head hurt: for example, “to be is to be perceived” and “that which is cannot be true.” Ugh. The main call-out I’d give is to Seneca, who was born around 4 BC in ancient Greece and wrote a pithy book titled The Shortness of Life. His perspective was that life is long enough if you know how to use it. He also observed, “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” Finally, something that sounded wise and seemed to make sense!
Still, I wanted a philosophy that was comprehensive, clear, and useful in modern day-to-day life and decision-making. I urgently needed a guide rope through what felt like dense fog. When my car windshield wipers stopped working one morning, I consulted the owner’s manual and felt unreasonably proud because, after learning how the wiper motor worked, I fixed the problem myself. Although I hope to own several cars (especially since the wiper repair reached the limit of my otherwise non-existent mechanical abilities), we only get this one lifetime (as far as I know). Wouldn’t it be helpful to have an owner’s manual for time? If such a manual existed, would I have taken the time to read it?
Prior to the pandemic, I wouldn’t have taken the time to read a manual like this. Life had been going swimmingly — with most things going according to plan — or at least reasonably well when I was winging it (most of the time). But when a lot suddenly felt uncertain and broken, I desperately wished I could reference an owner’s manual for orientation and inspiration on ways to get unstuck.
In hindsight, I now recognize that my prior mindset was a short-sighted one. If you are the new owner of something priceless — especially if it can never be replaced — the really smart move is to read the manual as soon as you can so that you get a better understanding of how things work. A smart owner would also refer to the manual when trouble arises, and the wisest would follow the recommended preventive maintenance tasks that can help avoid major breakdowns in the first place and extend useful life far into the future.
Since no one has given me a copy of a modern, practical manual like this (and I couldn’t find one in my philosophy review or elsewhere on Amazon or Google), I set out to write it. If the owner’s manual was going to serve as a valuable tool for understanding how to spend time well, my criteria was that it had to satisfy 10 criteria:
Be comprehensive and logically structured
Make sense with a quick skim — and add more value with a deeper read
Incorporate clear visual diagrams that cut to the chase of complex ideas
Use straightforward language
Help the reader identify common problems, diagnose them, and address them — and provide advice on how to avoid prevent future problems
Share what reliably works and why — informed by time-tested, research-based findings
Tell it like it is — avoid shying away from hard truths
Provide value from reading the entire manual, any section, or even a single page
Spend more time on topics that matter most
Leave readers better informed and equipped to get the most out of their time
Although I’m sure that, in many ways, I fell short of those aspirations, in one area I sought to improve on the typical owner’s manual. Most owner’s manuals are extremely dry and dull, which probably explains why most go unread. To make The Book on Time more accessible, I wanted it to be visually compelling by bringing the concepts to life through imagery, charts, and interesting design. Since graphic design isn’t my forte, I enlisted the support of a small local design studio, Magnifico Design, that was more than equipped for the job.
For the manual to be of most value, compelling visual design still needed substance. I felt more optimistic about finding valuable insight in modern science. After all, what I really wanted was a better understanding of what time-investment principles reliably work and why (i.e., doing X with your time consistently leads to Y positive or Z negative outcome). I have come to appreciate that the scientific method is the best way we’ve found for understanding how reality works. Accordingly, I wanted to find the most useful theories to incorporate into my decision-making and life choices about time. Specifically, if a theory a) had explanatory power by showing how one thing leads to another, b) could predict future outcomes that matter, c) had been objectively verified, and d) could be independently replicated (i.e., worked reliably), I wanted to know about it and put it in my toolkit for investing time well.
To go deep on the existing research, I recruited a team of talented Harvard graduates with degrees in neuroscience, psychology, economics, and the humanities, and encouraged them to go spelunking for several months into all the areas we could think of around using time in more meaningful and rewarding ways. We researched life regrets, happiness, astrobiology, cognitive decision making, sleep, flow states, exercise, stress, the benefits of vacations, our diet and gut microbiome, and a whole lot more. We also looked at relevant data on population size, global GDP, fertility rates, marriage rates, causes of death, and a range of other topics.
We found a lot of really interesting but highly fragmented findings across many narrow topics. Most of it was cloaked in hard-to-penetrate academic writing and sat behind hard-to-navigate paywalls. Despite these challenges, the team persisted in reviewing over 250 peer-reviewed studies and helped prioritize and distill many of the findings presented in The Book on Time.
Even after all this work, I still hadn’t found what I was looking for. I couldn’t find anything in the existing scientific literature to serve as a comprehensive and clear reference around the broad topic of investing time well. The big picture and supporting scaffolding were still missing. We had found many pieces of the puzzle, but they didn’t connect in a meaningful picture or a memorable way.
Rather begrudgingly, I realized I needed to dig deeper, think through my own experience, and apply logic. This meant starting by identifying the most important questions:
How much time do we have? (Answer: Life is short.)
Is there one single goal or purpose in life? If not, what goals can we choose to pursue in our lifetime? What goals do different belief systems tell us to pursue?
What common problems do people encounter and why? How can we avoid these problems?
How can we make the most of our time? How do decisions and actions about how we spend our time lead to a life well-lived (or the opposite)?
What is the relationship between time and money?
How do individuals and societies make progress over time? What is the role of education?
What determines our legacy over time, and how can we improve it?
The skill sets that I developed as a student and later as a consultant were surprisingly useful for navigating these soul-searching questions. I realized that these “big hairy problems” (consulting speak) required robust structure, rigorous analysis, and concise storylining if I was going to get closer to the truth and develop actionable recommendations. I feel deep gratitude for the mentors and experiences that forced me to grow during my time in college and while consulting with McKinsey & Co. Without them, I would have fallen short in confidence and capability to begin tackling these topics in an insightful way. My Cornell freshman communications professor, Craig Snow, even graciously volunteered his time to help me edit the book (16 years after giving me my lowest grade in school), and he still had plenty to teach me over a series of Zoom calls.
The heaviest lifting, and where I feel that the greatest contribution has been made, came in the newly created frameworks that provide most of the structure for The Book on Time. In other words, many of the perspectives on the initial questions outlined above came from late nights spent working things out on a whiteboard — starting with the basic fundamentals, rather than something similar that I found elsewhere and repurposed.
If I got these frameworks and perspectives right, they provide a helpful way to think about investing time well and are relatively straightforward — even obvious in hindsight. Therefore, I’d be shocked if they haven’t been thought about by most and written about by some in different forms before. But if they exist elsewhere, I haven’t found them even after a reasonable amount of effort looking. Here are The Book on Time frameworks and perspectives that I’d highlight in particular as being new (at least to me) when I developed them.
| New framework [working titles*] |
What question(s) it aims to address | Description |
|---|---|---|
| The Playing Field of Life Goals | What goals can we pursue in life? How do common belief systems align with this framework? |
By depicting a playing field, this new framework can help you be more intentional about which goals you pursue in life. The framework naturally encourages you to expand your goals beyond yourself (and even your lifetime) to include others and the world around you. My biggest "Aha!" moment and realization from all of this work — and what this framework drives home — is that being less self-oriented is the key to truly getting the most out of life. My mindset had been mostly oriented around pursuing goals focused on me in my lifetime. I was being narrow-minded and self-limiting. As I created this framework, I realized that I needed to reallocate more "chips" (i.e., where I invest my time) to encompass a broader set of life goals. I was surprised to discover that many of the greatest thinkers and leaders came to this same conclusion long before I did. Paradoxically, "give and you shall receive" is really solid advice. You'll find additional insights from Ghandi, Aristotle, MLK Jr., Churchill, Helen Keller, and more to similar effect on the page titled "A winning approach: focus less on yourself and more on others." |
| The Baker’s Dirty Dozen (13 Drivers of Despair) | What causes the many problems that we encounter? How can we avoid the big ones? |
This framework helps us identify problems stemming from three areas: 1) what we think and feel, 2) how we act, 3) what happens around us. The framework then describes 13 causes of problems we encounter within these areas, explains why they happen, and provides advice on ways to avoid them. When you encounter pain in life, it's a good sign that one or more of these areas are tripping you up. If you can identify the top few sources of grief and start to do better in those areas, you can significantly improve your life outcomes. This framework can help you diagnose what's going on. |
| The Leisure Time Left-overs | How much leisure time do we have? What fills the rest of our time? |
This visual illustrates a typical lifespan measured in months, where each month is represented by a blank square. After filling in the squares with sleep, work, and other commitments, this visual highlights what remains (i.e., our limited leisure time). This leisure time is particularly valuable, and each of us gets to choose how to spend it. |
| The Three Domains to Master Time (And Live Life Well) | How can we make the most of our time in life? | This simple yet comprehensive framework (with over 100+ pages of ways to put it into practice) identifies the specific ways we can 1) improve our quality of time by allocating our time well and getting the greatest benefit for the time spent, 2) maximize our quantity of time by staying healthy and avoiding an early death, 3) enhance our perception of time by learning to slow down, speed up, and savor time. Before developing this three-part structure of quality, quantity, and perception, I didn't know where to start if asked how someone can spend their time well. I like that this framework is fairly memorable, comprehensive, and provides actionable ways to organize and approach such a complex topic. If you want to get more bang-for-the-buck from how you spend your time (quality), live longer (quantity), or appreciate life more (perspective), you can use this framework in order to identify actionable how-to advice. This framework came to me when thinking about the visual of life as a series of boxes representing time (e.g., days, weeks, months, years)) and then thinking about optimizing it from a mathmatical perspective. You can either fill them up in different ways (quality), add more boxes (quantity), or change how you feel about the result (perception). That's it. Those are the only three things you can do with the boxes and your time. |
| A Fistful of Dollars (The Five Ways to Get Money) | What are the ways we can get money? How does each work? |
This playful yet insightful categorization outlines the five ways to make money (the clean way, the capitalist way, the lucky way, the dirty way, and the I'm king way), who fits in each category, and what it takes to get money that way. This way of thinking about money suddenly popped into my head when taking a Tiny Trip to go hiking in Maine's Acadia National Park. I had been thinking about how money is primarily a means of exchange for and claim on our time. This way of thinking about money helped me realize that the best monetary system would appropriately reward people for creating value for others. Another unexpected realization from this Tiny Trip, and maybe one that is more profound, is that taking a break is essential for creativity, reflection, productivity, and overall enjoyment of life. That short 3-day trip was the highlight of an otherwise rough year. I (and probably many others) need to take more breaks! |
| The Vicious Cycle Between Stress and Screen Time | How does screen time impact our valuable leisure time? | This framework breaks down how stress and screen time interact to reduce our quality and quantity of leisure time. After recognizing how one thing (scrolling on your phone in a moment of bordem or stress) leads to another (less leisure time, money, and allowing advertisers to influence your thoughts), I became a lot more aware of the downsides of being glued to screens. I realized that I still need to dial back my screen time. |
| Kids: Damned if You Do... | What are the pros and cons of having kids? | This short, non-exhaustive list captures what becomes blindingly obvious to any new parent. |
| The Flow of Progress | How do ideas turn into progress? What is the role of education? |
This three-part flowchart identifies the role of education in connecting people who come up with ideas to those who put them into practice. It seems (and is) simple, but I think it concisely captures the process that moves societies forward over time. The flowchart has real value if used as a tool to diagnose what's holding an individual, an organization, or society back from making faster progress. Have we not discovered solutions to our problems? Or have educators not picked up on the solutions - or not taught them well? Or are we aware of the solutions but fail to take appropriate action (e.g., climate change)? The example of handwashing during the pandemic is a timely illustration of the impact that success and failure can have. In this one simple case, countless lives have been saved (and, sadly, millions are still lost). I hope that others find this framework to be helpful when it comes to rigorously identifying failures in the flow of progress from idea to impact in order to identify the issues and come up with actionable ways to unblock the flow — this approach could literally be a lifesaver. |
| The Universal Motivators | What are we trying to achieve? Why? How can we achieve our goals? |
Although Maslow's hierarchy may help identify what motivates us, I have a tough time remembering it and find some aspects (e.g., self-actualization) to be a bit fuzzy. I observing my toddler son to see what seemed to be motivating him. Most, if not all, of his actions seemed to be attempts (not always successful) at pleasing his senses, getting along with others, and making sense of the world. When I applied these three objectives to the world of adults, I found that we all seem to be just trying to do the same to varying degrees. For me, this simple three-part structure served as a helpful jumping point from which to look at actionable ways to achieve each of these universal motivations. I then began to evaluate which of the three were most important to me and why. The resulting insights have given me more confidence and clarity in guiding decisions about how I spend my time. |
| Regret Minimization | How can we avoid the most common life regrets? | I've developed a bit of an obsession with life regrets. I've found that asking whether I would regret a decision when I'm 80 years old and looking back in a rocking chair brings a lot of clarity to what otherwise feel like big or scary decisions (e.g., should I move to a new city? should I propose? should I quit my job to start my own endeavor?). As a first step in the research, I looked at common life regrets identified in numerous studies. After identifying 13 common themes, I essentially flipped them to outline ways to avoid them. At the highest level, the solution boils down to being good to yourself, being kind to others, connecting to something larger than yourself, and keeping things in perspective. |
| Knowledge Insourcing vs. Outsourcing | What should we figure out for ourselves vs. learn from others? | There are only two ways we "know" things: we figure them out by ourselves, or we learn from the experience and thinking of others. I came to the conclusion that we have to figure out for ourselves only a few things (e.g., what questions are most important to answer, what goals are worth pursuing, how to spend our time, and what knowledge we need to succeed). The best and only way to get clarity is to take a break from your day-to-day routine. A meaningful break lets you grow through reflection, renewal, and new experiences. Almost everything else you should learn from the experience of the roughly 93 billion people who have come before you or the 8 billion people alive now. The odds are high that, for most topics, someone has figured out what works and why. To learn what others have discovered, reading books is a great place to start. |
| The Chinese Menu Problem | Is it better to seek new experiences or repeat familiar ones over time? What are the possible approaches? |
I called this The Chinese Menu Problem because I always order the same thing every time - hot and sour soup with pork fried rice. I've always enjoyed it for as long as I can remember, and the number of other options always seems overwhelming. The risk of going wrong by trying something else also seems high. But maybe there are other dishes I would like even more? This visual depiction shows different archetypes for balancing new experiences vs. repeating familiar ones over time. Which archetype we follow has an enormous impact on our lives. In mathematics, this is called the explore vs. exploit problem. The optimal strategy, if you have enough time, is generally to start out high on exploring new experiences, and eventually, move more towards exploiting the best of what's already familiar. Most of us narrow down too soon. This analysis led me to the recommendation that we try anything once — as long is it isn't harmful to you or others. |
| Our Lasting Legacy | What actually lasts over time? How can we improve our legacy? |
This coda to The Book on Time aims to identify what aspects of our time on Earth endures (i.e., via impact on others and the environment) after death — and for how long. The list of things that endure is remarkably short, and not all of the items are great (e.g., pollution). When I looked at this list, I found myself rather depressed by how few of our day-to-day efforts last in the big picture of time. Nevertheless, I feel a deep appreciation for many of the struggles and decisions that prior generations went through to create the opportunities we now enjoy. I feel a sense of obligation to pay it forward by doing my part to make things better — even if in little ways when and where I can — and not mess things up too much for future generations. As one small step in this direction, I got creative. I took a shot at writing the obituary that I don't want, which made it easy to then write (and start putting my time towards) the version that I do. When my days are over, I hope that my real obituary says something to the effect of "If you see a few exceptional, life-well-lived, obituaries over the coming decades, there's a chance they benefited to some small degree from Ethan's insights and work on spending time well." |
* You’ll find each of these frameworks and more in The Book on Time, but in order to preserve the narrative flow, I don’t name them. If anyone has ideas for better names, suggestions are welcome!
And so, was the time invested to write the book worth it? Even if I don’t sell a copy, the answer is an unequivocal yes. My only regret is that it took a global pandemic and staring into the abyss of business failure to make me take a break and truly think about these essential topics. Writing down my realizations and findings definitely pushed me to a greater level of organization and clarity in my thinking and conviction.
Most of all, I hope that by sharing more about my journey and insights, I’m able to encourage everyone to take an occasional break and to explore in greater depth for themselves the topic of how to spend time well. One of the best investments of your time is to think about how you use your time.
My co-founder Emily Bernard and I have always felt strongly that using our precious leisure time well and taking a break from our day-to-day routine is essential to being fully human. We started Tiny Trips to help people make the most of their time and take better breaks. Please feel free to connect with us — we’d love to hear from you!