Being in Time

And now consider what all this means for the crucial and basic question of choosing what to do with your limited time. As we’ve seen, it’s a fact of life that, as a finite human, you’re always making hard choices—so that, for example, in spending this afternoon on one thing that mattered to me (writing), I necessarily had to forgo many other things

We treat everything we’re doing—life itself, in other words—as valuable only insofar as it lays the groundwork for something else. This future-focused attitude often takes the form of what I once heard described as the “‘when-I-finally’ mind,”

Each of us has to decide, insofar as we can, whether to let the economic clock dictate our minutes and hours, and how we’ll know if we measure up.