Socrates, that wise philosopher of the 5th century BC, said:

"The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less."

And the consensus across the centuries has always been clear: happiness isn't a destination you reach by wanting or accumulating more, but a state of mind achieved by reducing what you want.

This week, I’m exploring the common problem of wanting to do more and more, yet never finding the time to do what you want.

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Script |424

Hello, and welcome to episode 424 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One of the most common questions I get asked is: How do I find the time to do everything I want to do?

And as David Allen said in his book Getting Things Done, you can do anything you want, but not everything.

In other words, you can do all the things you want to do, just not all at once.

This is a problem all humans have faced since the dawn of time: we are limited by the number of hours we have each day.

And before we acknowledged time and dates, we were still limited by daylight hours and the need to sleep.

In many ways, truly understanding that we will always be limited by time is the first step to discovering peace and happiness.

I remember many years ago having an argument with a colleague about why the iPhone’s constraints were better than Android’s lack of constraints.

This was back in the day when you really didn’t have many options for what you could add to an iPhone’s home screen. The date and time, design, and colours were fixed, and the apps you downloaded were presented as Apple allowed them to be.

Android phones, on the other hand, let you download widgets, move your app icons wherever you wanted, and install thousands of different themes.

What was interesting is that my colleague was always fiddling with his phone. Never being happy with the way his home screen looked.

I had no choice. Which meant I wasn’t fiddling with my phone all the time, trying to find the perfect setup and design. I was therefore happy with what I had.

Funnily enough, now that Apple does give us more choice as to how our phone home screens look, I do waste a lot of time trying to find the right colour combinations and layouts. (And I’m still not happy with it!)

So with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:

This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks: Hi Carl, I have a lot of things I want to do, such as learning to play the guitar, reading more books, and taking my kids out on the weekend. Yet I never have time to do any of these, and when I do, I’m so exhausted that all I want to do is sit and watch TV. It’s so frustrating. Do you have any ideas on how to fit all these things into my week?

Hi Scott, thank you for your question.

I’m not sure whether you have completed the “Perfect Week” calendar exercise yet, but I would recommend it.

This is an exercise where you take a blank weekly calendar and map out all the things you want to do each week by when you will do them.

Start with your personal life, then add your professional life. I will put a link in the show notes to a video I did on this.

This exercise tells you whether you are being overambitious. You will quickly see if what you want to do is realistic, impossible, or somewhere in between.

What most people find when they do this exercise is that they are being wildly unrealistic.

I’m currently reading Sir Alan Lascelles’ diaries from 1940 to 1945. Sir Alan was the Private Secretary to King George VI at that time, and it’s interesting to see how he spent his days.

Sir Alan loved going to the theatre, gardening and reading books. Those were his main hobbies. However, being a senior member of the Royal Household, he was also in demand from the King and the government of the day.

Yet, what I learned is that even during the war, because his “interests” were small, he was able to maintain all of them.

Take gardening, for example; Sir Alan’s home was outside London. So during the week when he was required to stay at Buckingham Palace, he could not attend to his garden. But at weekends, when he was not travelling with the King, he would spend his days pottering about in his garden.

During the week, when he was in London, he would combine lunches and dinners with meetings with government officials, and maintain his social life by going to the theatre with friends and family.

Now, in those days, people engaged in what we would call “knowledge work” today had much more flexible hours.

Most mornings were spent doing their most important work. The work that required focus.

One thing Sir Alan did each day was take a walk with the King for an hour, where they would discuss the affairs of state. In many ways, this was their daily meeting, though neither of them really considered it one.

This walk invariably took place just before lunch.

Lunch, again, was usually business, but occasionally it would be with his wife or son, or a friend.

Afternoons were often meetings, and they ran into dinners. From the diaries, it seemed that most evenings were spent meeting with a colleague or an official to discuss business.

If he didn’t have a business meeting in the evening, he would go to the theatre with his wife or a friend.

What’s interesting about this way of living is that there were no real-time barriers between work and personal life. Some of those evening meetings went on into the early hours of the morning; other times, if there were no meetings in the afternoon or evening, people would go shopping or take afternoon tea with a family member or friend.

There were instances where an important communique needed to be written, and Sir Alan would be up late at night writing it.

I would say that Sir Alan was working around 50 hours a week, but they were not evenly distributed. Some days he’d work 18 hours, the next maybe only 4.

Our obsession with the “work-life balance” has distorted our lives. Now we are trying to cram so much into our 8-hour work day that we leave ourselves exhausted at the end of it.

There’s no energy left to do the things we want to do. All we are fit for is crashing on the sofa and watching TV or scrolling our social media feeds.

What people like Sir Alan did was to spread their work more evenly throughout the day. They would take a walk for an hour mid-morning, have long lunches with friends, have business meetings in the evening over dinner, and often work on an important piece of work late into the night.

Now, it’s true that in the 1940s TV was not a thing. All people had for entertainment were the radio and record players. So reading books, going to the theatre with friends, and gardening were likely easy to do.

Today, we do not have any more time than they had in the 1940s. We still have the same 24 hours a day.

What has changed is we have far more options than they had.

And that’s where the problem is. It’s not time. It’s the options we have.

The activities you mention, Scott, should be entirely possible. Spending an hour or so each evening playing the guitar should not be a challenge; neither should reading a book for 30 minutes before bed.

If you were to get home around 7:00 pm, have dinner with your family, and then practice the guitar around 8:30, would that be impossible?

If not, what would you do instead after dinner?

Likewise, if you want to take your kids out at the weekend, what’s stopping you? What are you doing instead?

One of the best things I’ve ever done was to strip out the artificial lines between doing my work and my personal life.

Now, I do my most important work in the mornings and, wherever I can, avoid meetings at that time. I keep the afternoons relatively free for chores and family outings and do some work between 8 and 10 pm. That could be meetings, project work, or dealing with my communications and admin.

I’ve recently started reading books for 30 minutes or so after lunch. I find it refreshes me, and I’m ready for whatever’s in store for me in the afternoons. I used to read the news or look at social media at that time, which often drained me mentally...