Your dreams demand your best hours

a short reflection on the inequality of time

There are hours in a day, and then there are your best hours. Your dreams demand your best hours.

Edward Hopper’s famous ‘Nighthawks’

As a night owl’s night owl, I used to treat the 24-hour day like a loose construct—sleep negotiable, day and night arbitrary. It was effective for grinding through the infamous 60 to 80 to occasional 100-hour weeks of studying, training, or working. I coped by cramming life into the leftover hours: scheming while I walk, gymming at 1 a.m., writing in the dead of night, scrolling myself to sleep.

Complicating it all, I’m not a creature of routine but of bursts—I come alive in flashes, not on fixed schedules. Hence it’s all the more challenging to promise hours to someone else and still have enough for myself. (I always envied those who could live like metronomes, summoning their best selves on command.)¹

What I didn’t realize before, and still keep realizing, is that not all hours are created equal. There are hours in a day, and then there are your best hours.

Your best hours are the ones where you feel most alive, most energized, most inspired, most creative—most you. They’re when your focus is sharp, your confidence is high, and your heart is fully in it. You’re the best version of yourself, effortlessly. On an organic drug with no side effects but a fickle half-life.

And yet, too often, we give away our best hours. We give them to tasks that don’t matter to us, habits that don’t serve us, and people who don’t appreciate us—or whatever demands our attention in that moment. Urgency disguised as importance is the greatest thief of our most precious time.

Too often, we treat our best hours like they’re infinite. Like they’ll always be there waiting for us. (But they won’t.) Like we can always get more. (But we can’t.)

Over time, you learn: Your best hours are a gift—rare, finite, not to be wasted. I’m not the first to realize this, and I won’t be the last.

So, what deserves them?

Your dreams—whatever they are.

You might get by or even thrive on leftover time, but your dreams won’t be realized. Your dreams won’t be realized as ‘side projects’—unless they’re side projects in name only—unless you secretly grant them main project energy.

Your dreams demand your best hours—and nothing less.

Because when you give away your best hours, you give away your dreams—for someone else’s, or worse, for nothing.

You don’t want to look back on your life and wonder where they went. You want to know, without hesitation, that you gave them to the things, the people, the desires that matter most.

There are hours in a day, and then there are your best hours. Realizing this is easy—the hard part is still not wasting them.

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If you enjoyed this essay, consider sharing with a friend. You might also enjoy these:

Make something heavy // Pursuits that can't scale // Status limbo // Writer-builders // Invisible duels

P.S. If you marvel at the culture of time, I recommend this recent segment on The Clock, a 24-hour art film, featured on one of my dad’s favorite Sunday shows.

1. PG got this one right: https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html