You Have the Time
No more blaming the clock.
Every evening, millions of us collapse at the end of the workday convincing ourselves the day swallowed us whole. We wear our busyness as if it were a rare diamond, vaingloriously proclaiming we just don’t have the time to anyone who’ll listen.
It’s an airtight alibi in 2026 that gets us out of living the lives we tell ourselves we want. But the numbers don’t care about an alibi.
Cold hard facts: In seven days, there are 168 hours. Take off 56 hours for sleep (eight per night), 45 hours for work (nine per weekday), 10 hours for the commute (two per weekday) and seven for cooking. What’s left?
50 hours per week to do whatever you like.
Author Laura Vanderkam, a veteran in time management, examines this idea of reframing time from scarce to abundant in her book Big Time. The main idea is that freedom through the lens of a single evening is meagre. Zoom out to the week, or the month, and the volume of space becomes undeniable.
So, we have the time.
Estimation Fallacy
First off, we’re terrible observers of our own lives. Research involving thousands of time logs (page 49) reveals a consistent human flaw: we drastically overestimate the hours we spend working and severely underestimate the hours we spend chilling. As a general rule, the higher the number of work hours reported, the more likely the person is to be overestimating.
We cultivate a narrative of endless grind and deprivation, but the raw data rarely supports the story. When people track their time in short increments, the missing hours suddenly materialize. They find the pockets of time swallowed by low-friction scrolling or staring at a wall.
Ultimately, we can’t regulate a system without measuring the actual load. Tracking time removes the emotion and reveals the hard numbers.
Priority Shift
We use time as a scapegoat to avoid discomfort. Vanderkam suggests a brutal language shift by no longer accepting the phrase “I don’t have time” and, instead, replacing it entirely with “it’s not a priority.”
If we say our physical capacity is not a priority, or our relationships aren’t, the friction creates an intentional sting. It strips away the passive victim narrative. It forces us to acknowledge that the hours exist. We are actively choosing to allocate them elsewhere. The schedule simply acts as a mirror.
Commitment Friction
Let’s talk about cancelling plans. On Tuesday, an invitation sounds exciting. By Friday afternoon, we start talking ourselves out of it, manufacturing excuses about logistics, complications and frustrations.
The initial excitement was genuine. The cancellation is entirely a capacity issue. We committed when our system felt stable. We retracted when the accumulated strain of the week left us feeling unable to meet the demand of social interaction. Pay attention to that initial spark that pushed us to say yes.
In a similar vein, leaving evening plans to spontaneity will tend to send us down the path of least effort, says Vanderkam, which looks like the sofa or a screen: high-dopamine, low-friction.
Planning downtime when we’re not overstimulated (maybe the mornings, or the weekend) gives us more ownership of the decisions we’re making. Of course, there will be evenings where we do nothing, but as we know, stillness isn’t the same as recovery.
The logistics are always solvable; our nervous system simply needs the regulation required to follow through.
Gas Expansion
Time also slips away due to a phenomenon defined in 1955 called Parkinson’s Law. It dictates that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. We stretch a task to fit the container we provide for it.
If we tell ourselves we have an entire Sunday to complete something minor, the project can consume the entire day. We bloat our schedules, stretch the demand over hours and fill the empty space with distraction and inefficiency, sustaining the pressure on our system for no good reason.
Close out the distractions, complete the task and open up the rest of the day for more enjoyable options.
Closing Time
The compounding return of small actions at the end of a single year can be monumental.
We have dozens of hours this week to direct towards whatever we desire. Sure, we're busy, but the data suggests we’re likely not quite as stretched as we like to think. Stop sleepwalking through unconscious decisions, frittering away invaluable time on tasks and behaviours that don’t align with the people we tell ourselves we want to be.
Remember: you have the time.
Leave a comment