The only thing we really have is time and attention
People are very careful about their property. They check account balances, negotiate prices, insure apartments, and count costs. If someone tried to take their money, car or piece of land, they would react rather quickly.
We deal with time completely differently.
We waste an hour on a pointless meeting. Dozens of hours watching TV series that add nothing to our lives. Hundreds of hours of gaming. Thousands of hours scrolling your phone.
There is a paradox in this.
Money can be earned again. The company can be rebuilt. Redeem things.
The hour that has just passed will never come back.
Seneca wrote about it almost 2,000 years ago:
"Everything, Lucilius, is not ours, only time is our property."
And for me this is one of those trivial truths that are easy to understand, but much harder to live by.
There will be no more time
Time only works in one direction.
I myself am a supporter of delayed gratification. In life, sometimes you have to do things for many months that still don't bring results. Educate yourself, build a brand, create a product, invest or work on processes.
The problem begins when delayed gratification turns into permanent postponement of life.
Your work should improve your life over time.
If your career or business is growing and you have less and less time, more and more stress and less and less opportunity to do what you really like, it is worth asking yourself an uncomfortable question:
Why exactly am I doing this?
Career and company should be tools to build a better life. If a tool begins to consume the life of the person who created it, something has probably been poorly designed.
Seneca put this problem even more sharply:
“While we postpone life, it passes away.”
We give away the greatest good for free
We have a lot of time in life, but we spend it generously. Importantly, a large part of our work is taken away not only by our duties, but also by our own habits and simple carelessness.
Screens display new notifications all day long.
We sell our time at work and then use the money we earn to buy things we don't need.
We follow the media dramas of politicians, celebrities and people we don't know, even though we have no influence on their lives, and most often they have no real influence on ours.
Research from various groups shows that screens can consume several hours a day.
In one study, young adults used smartphones an average of 4 hours and 36 minutes a day. In a study of adults in Brazil, just watching TV consumed about 2.2 hours a day. Among adult gamers in another study, the average gaming time was almost 4 hours per day.
The scale becomes impressive when we convert it into years.
Activity | Daily | Annually | For 60 years |
Telephone, young adults | 4 hours 36 mins | 1679 hours | 11.5 years |
TV, adults | 2 hours 12 min | 803 hours | 5.5 years |
Gaming, adult players | 3 hours 48 min | 1387 hours | 9.5 years |
Gaming, teenagers in a Spanish study | 47 mins | 286 hours | approx. 2 years |
These numbers show one important thing.
Four hours a day sounds innocent. This is over 60 full days per year.
Time usually does not disappear in large chunks, but disappears little by little.
The economy of attention
The modern digital economy has another interesting feature: our attention itself has become a commodity.
Because modern man no longer spends his entire life fighting for survival, and necessary goods are widely available, global corporations have found another way to make money from us. The attention economy is a real economic concept in which human attention is treated as a limited resource and the most scarce commodity in the digital world.
Therefore, technology platforms, social media and advertisers are no longer competing just for money, but for users' time. Their main goal is to influence our purchasing decisions, which they achieve by taking over our attention. There are only 24 hours in a day, so each application fights for the smallest fraction of a second of our concentration.
Moreover, research shows that a tired person more easily succumbs to shopping temptations. Research shows that with limited cognitive resources, automatic reactions and emotions begin to play a greater role
For this reason, platform creators deliberately use distraction techniques - constant excess of information is supposed to lead to overstimulation and distraction.
Remember: if something is free, you are probably the product. We actually pay for supposedly free services with our time, attention and personal data.
When using social media, it is worth asking yourself one key question:
did I consciously decide that I wanted to devote my time to this?
It's one thing to watch a movie you really wanted to see, and another thing to wake up after an hour with the feeling that you've just mindlessly absorbed 70 short videos of which you don't remember anything.
In the first case, you use your time. In the second case, someone designed the product so effectively that they could extract this time from you.
Attention is equally important
Diligence does not guarantee results.
You can work twelve hours a day and still misuse your time.
If something interrupts your attention every few minutes, it becomes much more difficult to do something that requires deep concentration.
Therefore, it is worth separating two resources: time and attention.
You can have time without attention.
An hour of full concentration on an important problem may give a greater effect than a few hours of work interrupted by messages and switching between tasks.
Every distraction has a cost.
Research on interrupting work shows that when you return, your brain must recreate the context of the task and remember the goal you were working on. The longer and more demanding the break, the higher the cost of return may be.
Researchers even describe the phenomenon resumption lag, i.e. the measurable delay associated with returning to a previously performed task.
Today it is popular to talk about deep work, i.e. deep work. The idea itself is very simple: for a specific period of time, you do one important thing and limit as much as possible everything that tries to take away your attention.
In practice, this means very simple things:
turning off notifications,
limiting the number of meetings,
reserving parts of the day for work that no one can interrupt.
It sounds trite, like most good rules.
It's only when you try to use them consistently for several years that you see how much they change the way you work.
Take time and attention more seriously than money
A person can spend half an hour looking for a product that is PLN 20 cheaper and then, without thinking, spend three hours on something that gives him neither pleasure, development nor money.
That's why it's worth starting to think about time a little more in terms of investment.
When you wake up in the morning, consider:
"What will I spend my time on today and will it be a good investment?"
At the beginning of many projects, we do everything at once, but over time it is worth doing more and more often activities in which our time brings a greater effect.
First, you remove things that take a lot of time and don't change much. Then you delegate some of the work. You automate what is repetitive. You move the recovered time to where you are really needed.
And once you sort it out, the whole process starts all over again. Because you can always find a better use of your time and attention.
At the end of his letter, Seneca uses a very good metaphor:
“It's too late to save when you see the bottom.”
It is worth learning to watch your time before it becomes dramatically scarce.
Focus and limitation lead to success
People who achieve success and fulfill their dreams have the same day as the rest.
They do this by managing their time and attention well - and they can consciously decide what to do no they will do.
The entire economy is a trade in scarce resources that have alternative uses:
If you say "yes" to another project, you are giving away hours that you will not spend on developing the current one.
If you say "yes" to the next meeting, you won't use that time for work that requires concentration.
If you give yourself three hours of screen time every night, those same three hours won't magically appear in the morning.
People who pursue goals effectively simply consciously decide what they won't do and spend their time where it provides the most benefit.
Five rules that I try to apply myself
I limit technological overstimulation. I turn off unnecessary notifications and try not to have screens on all the time. On social media, I prefer to create rather than endlessly consume other people's content.
I abandon projects without a future. It's easy to fall into the sunk cost trap and pursue something just because you've already spent a lot of time or money on it. Giving up on a dead project creates room for something better.
I try not to live someone else's life. I focus mainly on what I have real influence on or what really affects my life. It is sometimes worth asking how much watching political or celebrity dramas from years ago has changed our lives. If not much, perhaps today's ones don't deserve that much attention either.
I limit my consumption. Every thing costs more than just money. It also costs the part of your life needed to earn this money. Therefore, before purchasing, it is sometimes worth asking: do I really need it?
I don't turn everything into productivity. Since you are building a company to live better, time spent walking, listening to music, playing sports, reading or with loved ones can be one of the best investments. It is important that it is a conscious decision.
Once in a while, do an audit of your own time
Life is not about not wasting a single minute.
It's unreal.
Sometimes you will watch a stupid movie, go to a pointless meeting or spend half the day doing something that will later turn out to be completely unnecessary.
What is more important is to know approximately where time disappears.
It is worth doing a similar audit of your own life from time to time, reviewing the calendar from the last few weeks and asking:
What actually moved me forward?
Is the way I spend my time leading me to the life I really want to have?
What was I doing just out of habit?
How much of my time and attention have I allowed media and technology to take away?
Which tasks generate the most value per hour of my work?
What takes up a lot of my time when it shouldn't?
Seneca wrote almost two thousand years ago that the worst waste of time comes from one's own carelessness.
Today we have many more tools to waste it.
Therefore, it is worth keeping an eye on it a little more consciously.
So I hope that if you read this till the end, it was a good one
investment of your time.
Data and sources
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter I
Danielle L. Harvey, K. Milton, A. Jones, A. Atkin, 2021, Preventive Medicine: International trends in screen-based behaviors from 2012 to 2019.
C. Pieh, E. Humer, Andreas Hoenigl et al., 2025, BMC Medicine: Smartphone screen time reduction improves mental health: a randomized controlled trial.
P. C. Cardoso, T. C. M. Caldeira, T. M. de Sousa, R. Claro, 2023, American Journal of Health Promotion: Changes in Screen Time in Brazil: A Time-Series Analysis 2016-2021.
Fernando Gómez-Gonzalvo, Pere Molina, J. Devís-Devís, 2020, Entertainment Computing: Which are the patterns of video game use in Spanish school adolescents?
Haylei Scoggins, Ryan R. Porter, R. Braun-Trocchio, 2025, Frontiers in Sports and Active Living: Gameplay and physical activity behaviors in adult video game players.
C. Monk, J. Trafton, D. Boehm-Davis, 2008, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied: The effect of interruption duration and demand on resuming suspended goals.
E. Altmann, J. Trafton, 2006, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: Timecourse of recovery from task interruption: Data and a model.
K. Vohs, R. Faber, 2007, Journal of Consumer Research: Spent Resources: Self-Regulatory Resource Availability Affects Impulse Buying.
G. Iyer, Markus Blut, S. Xiao, Dhruv Grewal, 2019, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science: Impulse buying: a meta-analytic review.
