3 Hours or Nothing

Musing #14 | The merits of being binary with your time

For the past year and change, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I spend my time. And not just thinking about it but also making some blunt force changes to it.

Not to say I wasn’t thinking about time before, but I wasn’t thinking the right way. I was more worried about time from the perspective of where I was going and how fast I could go — less from a place of clear purpose, energy, alignment, and the scariness that is opportunity cost.

In this process, I’ve crystallized some truths about myself and the world. Truths that I vaguely knew before but somehow didn’t take seriously enough or thought I could work around.

There’s no rocket science in these truths. They’re as old as time. But they’re lessons that I think every single person has to learn for themself.

Truth #1: Your brain and body have a default mode that works.

I’m a highly analytical and creative person whose brain works mostly like that of a creative. Lots of starts and stops, ups and downs, nothings and then all of a sudden spectacular somethings. Understandably it’s very hard to schedule for these. I need big chunks of uninterrupted, unscheduled time to get anything meaningful done. So I’m the person who suffers on the “manager’s schedule” and relishes in the “maker’s schedule” (yet needs to self-enforce some structure).

Truth #2: If you’re not on your time, you’re on someone else’s.

And if you’re not working on your “life’s work,” you’re working on someone else’s. This has always been true (so much so that I feel silly admitting I didn’t pay enough attention to it before). And this is true for almost any kind of demand on your time. A DM asking for feedback on a product. An email inviting me to come on a podcast. A VC asking to meet just to “trade notes” on a sector. A new acquaintance asking to grab coffee. Or as significant as someone asking me to work on their startup.

Truth #3: The more things you do, the less well you do each of them.

There’s a sweet spot for the number of things — priorities, passions, people that any person can dedicate time and energy to. If it’s just one though, “work” for example, there’s paradoxically some ineffectiveness to it. You need some variety, to give rest and relief to your brain, to have new experiences that spark new thoughts. But above a certain number, all of the things start taking a hit. There’s no single perfect number, and it’ll vary by person, capacity, phase of life, and the like. But between you and me, I think the number is best between 2 and 4 things (and it’s rarely 4).

Once I accepted these truths in earnest, I started making changes to how I do things. These changes can be small and gradual or big and sudden. They can allow for gray areas or take a strictly black and white, binary approach. Perhaps because of my tendency to find myself in the gray, I’ve leaned more towards the binary. And out of processing these truths, I’ve come up with 2 new rules for myself.

3 hours or nothing.

This is for the things that always present themselves as “quick.” A quick question about something, a quick phone call, a quick coffee. They’re always billed as 30 minutes or less — never more. But I’ve realized no matter how short the on-the-line or face-to-face parts are (and usually they’re not), these always take more time and energy. There’s tangible or mental preparation. And they linger as distractions. (Introverts and creatives more often seem to experience time this way.)

Rule #1: don’t agree to anything “quick” unless you’re willing to spend 3+ hours on it.

When you follow the 3 hours or nothing rule, your priorities get clear, you procrastinate less, you’re more focused and more productive, and time management becomes a lot easier. You say “no” a LOT more. And the “yes” becomes a lot more emphatic. You find yourself less stressed, less overthinking about the past and less anxious about the future.

This is one way of calculating opportunity cost that you often don’t and embedding it in your choices. And more specifically using binaries to help. Yes and no is a binary. 3 hours or nothing is a binary. Personal vs. professional can be another. So one of my sub-rules is to look for more ways to be binary (I’ll probably write more on this later).

I’m giving examples that are mostly about other people asking me for time, but it works the other way around too. I don’t initiate “quick” things anymore either. So when I ask someone to grab coffee or grab lunch, I’m willing to spend 3 hours. (There may inevitably be conflicts or they may not have time to, but I’m willing, and I wouldn’t feel bad afterwards if it ended up being 3 hours. I’d be satisfied.)

Longer-form anything is much less transactional and more human too. Magical things don’t happen in 30 minute increments. They happen in those unexpectedly long, late night conversations when nobody has an impending deadline to impose.

I call this rule #1 because sometimes you have to scale it up. If I’m considering a job opportunity or moving to a new city or taking on a new creative interest, whether it’s 30 minutes or 3 hours makes no difference — both mean nothing. Enter rule #2.

*P.S. Analytical me wrote a ‘director’s cut’ on why 3 hours specifically in the footnotes.