Reading time: 15 minutes
Tick. Tock. Tick.
I do not live in the suburbs. I do not have a commute. I never book a hotel outside a city center. I do not sit in meetings that could have been a message.
There is a long list of things I do not do. It is the reason there is a much longer list of things I have done.
Memento mori.
If I died today, I think I would have lived more than most people hope to fit into a whole life. Not more work. More places, more people, more of the different things a life turns out to be able to hold. And not because I found more hours. Because I gave fewer of mine away.
Here is the argument, up front. Money comes back. Careers get rebuilt. Mistakes get corrected. Time does none of that. And almost nobody spends it like something that runs out.
The friends who won the other way.
I have friends who have made more money than they will ever be able to spend. And when we sit down together, they are the ones asking me about my life. Where I was last month. Where I spend the winter, which is the part that gets them, because they take a week in February and I take the season.
And it is not just them. Everybody asks how I find the time to stay fit and to eat the way I do, as though it were a scheduling trick and not a decision.
They made a trade, and I think most of them knew exactly what they were trading. Work now, live later. Later is a real place and they fully intend to go there. The problem with later is that it keeps its own schedule, and by the time you arrive the knees are gone, the parents are gone, and the children you were building it for grew up while you were building it.
And I should be honest about the other direction. Money does buy time, and I buy it. Living in the center of a city costs more than living outside it, and what the difference buys is the commute I do not have. The Uber instead of the parking. The direct flight instead of the cheaper one with a stop.
Warren Buffett once showed Bill Gates his calendar. Paper, and almost empty. Whole weeks with nothing written in them. Buffett's line about it was this. "I better be careful with it. There is no way I will be able to buy more time."
And the successful people I know have worked this out. Longevity is the trend now, and it is not vanity. They spent thirty years trading time for money, and somewhere in the last few years it landed that the one asset they cannot buy more of is years. So they are trying to buy those back with sleep and training and bloodwork and a great deal of money. It has become an industry, and it gets its own Experiment.
Nobody keeps the time they save.
Start with the hour, because somebody had to invent it. The Egyptians divided daylight into twelve parts and darkness into twelve, and those parts are what we still call hours. But they were not the same length as one another. A daylight hour in summer was long and a daylight hour in winter was short, because there is more daylight in summer and they cut it into twelve either way. That is how time worked for more than two thousand five hundred years. The minutes and the seconds came later, out of Babylonian arithmetic, which is why we still count time in sixties.
Then the monks got involved. In twelve eighty three, in Dunstable in England, somebody built a mechanical clock. It was not built to organize a working day. It was built because a monastery has to pray at fixed hours. Then the cathedrals wanted one, and then the towns, and a bell that had called men to prayer was calling them to work. A machine cannot tell June from December, so it made every hour exactly as long as every other hour, and that is the moment the hour stopped being a piece of the day and became a thing you could count, and spend, and run out of.
And once an hour was a unit, it could be priced. Somewhere between the first farmers and the first factories, an hour became something you could sell to somebody else, which is where most hours still go.
Ever since, we have been building machines to win some of them back. The washing machine. The car. The calculator, then the computer, then the phone in your pocket. The internet. Google Maps, which tells you when you will arrive, so you stop leaving early and waiting. And now an LLM that writes the email you were dreading. Every one of them worked. Every one of them did precisely what it promised. And somehow nobody ended up with a free afternoon.
Yuval Noah Harari, the historian who wrote Sapiens, put the whole thing in one sentence. "We thought we were saving time. Instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed."
And we are only halfway through this one. Artificial intelligence is already giving hours back, and that is the half everybody is watching. The other half is being built quietly behind it, and it is robotics. I am keeping a close eye on that one. Elon Musk predicts the two together will make work itself optional. Between them they will hand back more time than every machine and tool we have ever built, combined.
Which changes nothing on its own. A machine cannot give you time. It can only free it. What happens after that is decided by you, or it gets decided for you.
And the first thing that decides for you is other people.
The lost hours that make me angry are the ones somebody else spends for me, without asking. Thirty minutes late. A meeting that could have been three lines. A cancellation the day of, when I have already cleared the evening for it. They spent something of mine that does not come back, and they will never once think of it as such. My friends know this about me, and they know they will hear about it. I respect other people's time and I expect the same, because I know exactly what it is worth.
I am efficient, and I was efficient long before there was anything to automate. For thirty years I have run multiple businesses in different industries at once, and I have always had an office at home. Most of them have offices too. I just barely use them. The paperwork and the things that need my signature are done in the first two days of the week. The rest of it is the work I actually chose. There is a system for everything in my life, because my time is the most valuable thing I own. Every space I use is built for flow: no clutter, everything with a purpose, from my kitchen to the line behind a restaurant counter. And I have always been first to adopt the tools that save time, from the pager to the Palm Pilot to the BlackBerry, and every tool since that promised me back an hour.
The latest one is a complex AI agent I built. It reads my emails and my newsletters, summarizes them, hands me the things I actually need to act on, and takes back the ones I want it to handle itself. It used to take me at least two hours a day. It takes twenty to thirty minutes now. That is ninety minutes back, every single day.
And if you ask me honestly where those ninety minutes went, I filled them. A longer list with more things to check off it, and time spent optimizing the agent so that one day it gives me even more back. I am spending the hours it saved me on making it save me more.
Speed was never the answer. Nor efficiency, nor better tools. If every hour you win is absorbed by something else, then getting faster cannot save you. Speed does not empty the day. It feeds it. You are not fighting a shortage of hours. You are fighting the thing that eats them, and it will eat whatever you put in front of it.
Saying no is the whole method.
You cannot make more time, and the time you free does not stay free on its own. So the only hour you will ever get back is one you take off something that has it now. That is it.
So why does almost nobody do it? Because saying no costs you in the moment, saying yes costs you later. And because a new commitment feels like progress while dropping one feels like losing something, so the list only ever grows.
Steve Jobs was asked at WWDC in nineteen ninety seven about focus, and he answered. "Focusing is about saying no. And you've got to say no, no, no. And when you say no, you piss off people."
That last part is the whole difficulty. Everybody agrees with the principle. Nobody wants the conversation.
The no is not for the people you love. Helping family and friends is what the time is for. What I refuse is work I do not want, plans I do not want, and above all committing in advance. I keep my calendar open because I do not know yet where I will be. Weddings are the worst of it, because they want an answer six months out, and I do not know if I will even be in the country that week. It looks like flakiness and it is the opposite. I will not promise, because I will not cancel.
What I do not spend it on.
When we were younger my friends talked about the Ferrari they were going to own one day. I always wanted the back of a Rolls Royce, with a driver. Until then an Uber will do. Not because I dislike driving. What I refuse is the traffic. In the back of a car I can catch up on reading, take a call, or answer a few things I owe people. I am looking forward to the self driving car.
I have always lived in the center of a city, and I refuse to spend my days driving in traffic. I own a car and I use it once or twice a week, for a Costco run and errands. When I go out to dinner in town I take an Uber and never have to think about parking. I still drive for a barbecue in the suburbs, or a weekend out of town. I live downtown, so most things are a walk or a bike ride.
None of that is a moral achievement and I want to be clear about it. These are choices I have been lucky enough to be able to make. If you have young children and a school run and a job that needs you at an office or on the road, the choices available to you are different ones, and the refusing is the part that still applies. You may not be able to drop the commute, but the hour that goes to scrolling after dinner is still yours to take back.
I used to tell everybody I was busy. Busy day, busy week. Then I started looking at the people around me, and a single mother with two kids is busier than I have ever been, in her own way, and nobody hands her a medal for it. So I stopped saying it.
Everybody is busy. The only thing we differ on is where the busy goes.
And I waste time too.
I know I do it, and I choose what I waste it on. That is the only part I claim.
I take the hours off the commute and I go out to the pool, sit in the sun with a podcast or some good music, take a swim. I go for a walk. I go to the gym. I read, and now I write. And I see my friends, and I call the ones I cannot see, out of the blue, just to catch up, and those turn into the best conversations I have. My friends are always surprised I keep in touch with so many people. I just pick up the phone.
From the outside that looks like waste. It is not lost time, it is the recharge, and it is the first thing most people cut when they get busy, which is exactly backwards. And your list will not look like mine. The exhibition you keep meaning to see before it closes. A book still on the shelf. The hobby you put down. The side project you keep saying you will begin. An evening with nothing in it. The point is not what goes in the hour. The point is that you chose.
What I removed this year.
I do not make New Year's resolutions. I made one this year, and it was not to add anything. It was to remove. One of the things on the list was a fasting app I had started using a few months earlier, called Simple, which wanted me to log every fast and every meal, and turned something simple into a daily admin job. Gone.
Another was muting group chats. Another was my inbox. I unsubscribed from everything that had stopped earning its place. I now get three emails in a morning, and what is left is handed to the agent for sorting.
The bigger one was the Apple Watch rings. I still wear the watch sometimes. What I turned off was the rings.
If you have never worn one, it gives you three rings to close every day. Move, Exercise and Stand. You set your own daily goals, and mine were set high. Your friends can see whether you closed yours, so it quietly becomes a competition, and the watch hands you a badge when you hit a milestone. I had closed all three every single day for nine hundred and seventy days in a row. The badge for a thousand was thirty days away.
I stopped it there. Not because I stopped moving. Because I was done with a machine on my wrist telling me when to stand up.
The biggest one is older than this year's resolution, and it happened by accident, in two thousand nineteen. I flicked my phone to silent on a flight from Beirut to Riyadh, then decided not to switch it back for the rest of the trip, to see what it was like. I have never switched it back. It is the best thing that has ever happened to my attention. In the restaurant years I would not have dared. Something goes wrong at one in the morning and somebody needs an answer.
Arthur Brooks, who teaches happiness at Harvard, calls it a quiet addiction running your life. A survey this year puts the average American at one hundred and eighty six looks a day. Brooks also has a test that takes an hour. Put the phone away and count how many times you think about it. More than once every five minutes and you have your answer.
And I am guilty of this as well. I do not use TikTok and I do not doom scroll reels. But I have an interesting feed on Instagram: research, studies, ideas, things worth saving and sharing. So every time I open the phone I learn something, which is exactly what makes it hard to put down. It is still a big distraction and I know it.
And it is not an accident. Sean Parker, who co-founded Napster and then became the first president of Facebook, said so in public in 2017: the thought behind these apps was how to consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible, by giving you a dopamine hit every time somebody reacts to what you posted. He called it exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. Then he said the people who built it, himself included, understood it and did it anyway.
And this is the part that actually costs you. You can own the hour and still hand it away in pieces, thirty seconds at a time, until the hour is gone and nothing in it stayed.
Time off is not the same as time back.
Employees were tracked through their holidays, and what predicted coming back better was not just how long they went for. It was how much control they had over their own time while they were away. There is a second finding beside it. Put something you enjoy in the calendar at a set time and people enjoy it less.
I know people who take one holiday a year and run it like a project. Multiple cities, a different hotel every few nights, a restaurant booked for every evening, and a fear of missing something running underneath all of it. They come home tired and they say so, and then they wait eleven months and do it again.
Mine has always been different. I pick a destination, I book the flight and a hotel in the city center, and that is where the planning stops. I land, I check in, I step out and start walking, and I work the days out as they come. It is also how I end up doing the best things I have ever done on a trip: an afternoon stroll through Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris while I waited for a girlfriend, and three days at the World Expo in Milan that I did not know was on when I flew in for business.
I am lucky. I have never had a boss, so nobody approves my dates, and I do not have children whose school year decides when I am allowed to leave. So I take a break when it feels like it is time. Sometimes a random day off in the middle of the week. Sometimes out of town for a weekend. Sometimes a week or more somewhere warm.
The real ones for me are the gaps between projects, and those can run to months, not weeks. Stretches where the next big project has not been chosen yet. Ideas do not arrive while every inch of your attention is occupied. They arrive when your head is clear. Artists and writers have always known this and have often been mocked for it, because from the outside a person staring at nothing looks like a person doing nothing.
Every good decision I have made in the last twenty five years was made inside one of those gaps, including the latest one, going all in on artificial intelligence, which I only got to do because I was between things and had the room to sit with it long enough to see what it could already do.
The Greeks made a distinction English mostly does not. Chronos is the clock, the hour gained or the hour lost. Kairos is the right moment, the one you cannot schedule and do not get back. From inside kairos it can look like nothing is happening.
You hear more and more about the importance of mindfulness and meditation, and there is a reason for that. That one gets its own Experiment.
The Japanese have a word for the gap itself. Ma. The older character is a door with the moon showing through the crack. It means the interval, the space between, and it is not treated as nothing. It is treated as the part that carries the meaning. In music, ma is the silence between the notes that turns them into music.
The gap is not the empty part. The gap is where the music is.
You do not need months. A single day that nobody has a claim on does the same job.
The answer was never a bigger holiday. It is a weekend you actually control, and a stretch between two things where nobody is waiting on you.
There are many sentences about time. Here is one of mine.
An hour is never handed to you. It has to come out of your own day, off something that already has it. Sometimes that is a habit. Sometimes a notification. Sometimes a person.
There is one last thing, and you have probably felt it without ever naming it. A year at twenty felt enormous. A year at forty is gone before you have finished describing it. The clock did not change. What changed is how much of it was worth noticing. Routine is what makes a year vanish, because almost nothing in it is worth keeping. New places, new people, new problems leave marks. That is why a full life feels longer than a busy one. Not more hours. More of them that stayed.
This is why every generation talks about the good old days. It is not that life was better then. It is that you were still meeting things for the first time, and a first time is the only kind your head bothers to keep.
La Fontaine wrote a fable about a cicada who sang on a branch all summer, while an ant carried food past him, grain by grain, for a winter that had not arrived yet. Everybody tells it as though the ant won. The ant has a full larder and no summer.
I have been both, and never by accident. I will work around the clock on something for months, and then I will take a season off. The part that matters is choosing for yourself which one you are being, and when.
Yesterday is spent. Tomorrow is not promised. If today were the last one, you already know what you would have done with it. That is what memento mori means to me. It is not about dying. It is that today already counts.
So before you put this down, do one thing.
Look at the last seven days and find an hour you would not pay for if somebody put a price on it. Take it back. Then decide, on purpose, where you want to spend it.
Thank you for giving me the most valuable thing you own. Thank you for giving me your time.
Experiment 004 is complete. You just read it.
Georges
The long version of who is writing this is on the About page. Fifty years of taking things apart, in one place.
Usually one Experiment on Sunday. Lab Notes in between. Free.