Year-end Review - 2022

100 years, 5200 weeks, 3 billion heartbeats.

With optimistic calculations (and in a lucky case), we might have this much time at our disposal. Life isn't necessarily short; we just often waste a part of it. In everyday life, it hardly occurs to us that time is one of our most valuable resources: it is limited and unyieldingly decreasing.

If, however, we manage it well, anything can fit in.\*

Anything, but not everything: you can be anything, but not everything – you can learn anything in the world, but not everything. You can have time for anything, but not for everything.

It is not that life is short, but that the wasted time is a lot.

In today's world, the noise, the useless – and often false – information, the never-ending series of meetings, the projects, the abundance of advertisements and commercials competing for our attention and stimulating our dopamine pathways is so great that we don't even notice what really matters.

When planning my time and energy, I no longer only take into account what I must do, but I also take stock of what I will not do.

If we don't allocate our time and prioritize, then someone else will do it for us: the phone vibrates 24/7, the notification pings about meeting invites and reminder emails, the colorful and fragrant advertisements and commercials flicker in our faces, and all the while our never-ending TODO list just keeps growing.

I could only get rid of this negative spiral by planning and measuring every hour of my 2022 year\*. Without details, here is the approximate time requirement for a few activities:

~2890 hours of sleep,

~800 hours spent reading (70+ books, approx. 25,000 pages),

~570 hours of running training (3670 km run, +129 hours of stretching, +104 hours of strength training),

~152 hours of listening to podcasts,

~ 2000 hours of work,

~1700 hours of eating-drinking-relaxation-traveling and time spent with family/friends,

~300 hours of spontaneous activity (good news for the skeptics, that even this type of planning-measuring-allocation will not kill the spontaneity of life, as hundreds of hours of ‘random other activities’ still enter the equation. I will try to eliminate this in 2023 with even more accurate planning and measurement.)

Only by the end of 2022 was I able to accept (seeing the ‘reports’) that if I say yes to something, I have simultaneously said no to many other things – everything cannot always fit, everywhere. That is why our time and attention are so valuable.

In addition, a great lesson for me was that without a plan, we will only perform random activities and – not very surprisingly – we will achieve random results: in sports, work, studies, and basically in any area of life.

But planning alone is not enough: measurement (what we don't measure, we cannot improve) and execution also carry a lot of weight: we brainstorm, we dream, but after a while, we have to get up from the drawing board and start implementing.

This is often where the momentum runs out. This is where dreams go to rest.

Time, however, unyieldingly just keeps passing.

I don't remind myself of this every day (‘memento mori’) to be anxious about the passage of time, but on the contrary: to feel the weight and significance of every single hour, day, and year.

For me, the unbearably painful fact of the passage of time can be resolved almost only by running (more precisely, by the flow experience provided by running).

For minutes, for hours – as long as the kilometers last, as long as the flow lasts.

But the flow eventually ends; the kilometers ‘run out’, the race will be over. And nothing remains but the return from the timeless, cloudless, almost transcendent state to the ‘real world’, where our time cannot last forever.

It is our own responsibility with whom and with what activities we fill the ‘frame’ allotted to us.

When ‘the time comes’, will we feel regret or satisfaction:

did we do all that we were capable of during our lives?

100 years, 5200 weeks, 3 billion heartbeats.

The clock is ticking