Everlasting Productivity Ideas from The Minds of Ancient Philosophers

#1. Time is more valuable than money.

Improving productivity has been the pursuit of — well, everyone. It’s in your nature to make better use of your time. You want your head to hit the pillow every night knowing you completed everything you set out to do. You want to feel accomplished; you want to feel like you’re progressing towards your goals.

Gregory J. Redington, president of Redcom, an engineering and construction company in New Jersey, says:

“If I have 10 things I want to finish in a day and I finish five, I get frustrated because I am not productive.”

Daniel Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness, once said,

“A wandering mind is not a happy mind. We spend over 45% of our waking hours thinking about multiple tasks at once. Moreover, we’re unable to focus on the thing we’re doing at the moment. This kind of mind-wandering can lead to increased unhappiness in the long term.”

To live a happier and more fulfilling life, you need to learn how to plan your time accordingly. A study from the Journal of Happiness Studies discovered that people who manage their free time have a better quality of life.

There are a few ancient philosophers that have plenty to teach about time management and productivity as well. With that being said, here are 3 essential things to remember.

Time is More Valuable than Money

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, better known as Seneca, was a Roman Stoic philosopher and statesman who ultimately became one of the most influential figures of the Roman Imperial Period. He once wrote:

“No person hands out their money to passers-by, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers.”

Seneca’s thoughts often ran contrary to popular thinking that “time is short.” He chose to believe and preach that we do have enough time to accomplish our goals and live an extraordinary life, as long as we treat time as our most precious resource.

“People are frugal in guarding their personal property, but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” — Seneca

Seneca was one of the wealthiest men in Rome during his lifetime, and despite his incredible wealth, Seneca was mostly indifferent to it. In his essay, “On the Shortness of Life,” he writes:

“It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil.”

He made a point of periodically depriving himself of the luxuries he had available so that his peace of mind would never depend on possessions and materialistic things. By stripping away the externals as often as he could, he made certain that the thing he most valued was the only thing he could truly lose and could never get back: his time.

Seneca knew that by spending his time on the things that truly mattered, like reflection, bonding with family, and doing important work, then the rest of his life would eventually fall into place.

Unlike money, which can obviously be squandered and regained, time is such a precious resource that you can never get back. And to those who do choose to squander their time, Seneca says:

You are living as if destined to live forever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!

Wasting time is one of the worst things you can do to yourself, and he urges people to be more skeptical of any activities that would drain you of your time as well as be ready to defend yourself against unworthy pursuits.

Seneca pushes us to live in the moment and not delay happiness. Quit trying to plan out the future and as a result, bypassing the precious present moments of your life which you should, in fact, be enjoying and living out to their fullest potential.

Time is something you can never get back, which is why you need to guard yours fiercely. Time is money, after all.

Important Tasks Beat Urgent Tasks

When you get to work in the morning, do you typically lean towards doing things that are important and will get you ahead, or do you lean towards doing whatever is right in front of your face?

From personal experience, I can say I’ve always chosen to do what’s easy or urgent. Not what really moves the needle. And, you’re probably in the same boat. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote:

“It is essential to for you to remember that the attention you give to any action should be in due proportion to its worth, for then you won’t tire and give up if you aren’t busying yourself with lesser things beyond what should be allowed… Since the vast majority of our words and actions are unnecessary, corralling them will create an abundance of leisure and tranquility. As a result, we shouldn’t forget at each moment to ask, is this one of the unnecessary things?”

Author Stephen Covey popularized Eisenhower’s Decision Principle in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey created a decision matrix to help people distinguish between tasks that are actually important and not important, as well as what’s urgent and what’s not urgent. This matrix consists of a square divided into four boxes, labeled: 1) Urgent/Important, 2) Not Urgent/Important, 3) Urgent/Not Important, and 4) Not Urgent/Not Important.

“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.” — Dwight Eisenhower.

Urgent tasks mean they need your immediate attention. These are the to-do’s that scream your name. Urgent tasks will always put you in a reactive mode, one marked by a defensive, negative, hurried, and narrowly-focused mindset.

Important tasks are what will contribute to your long-term mission, values, and goals. Sometimes important tasks are also urgent, but typically they’re not. When you focus on important activities, you operate in a responsive mode, which helps you remain calm, rational, and open to new opportunities.

In our current world, the ability to filter the signal from the noise, or distinguish between what’s urgent and what’s truly important, is an essential skill to have. To end things off, productivity guru Tim Ferriss says:

“Doing something well does not make it important. I think this is one of the most common problems with a lot of time-management or productivity advice; they focus on how to do things quickly. The vast majority of things that people do quickly should not be done at all.”

You Are Only in Control of So Much

Not understanding what you do and don’t have control over is preventing you from progressing. Epictetus says:

“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are pursuit, opinion, aversion, desire, and, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and whatever are not our own actions.”

You need to learn to stop worrying about anything and everything, especially when you can’t do anything about it. The more energy you waste worrying, the more time you waste not doing what’s important.

You can’t control the outcome of anything; there are too many variables that will influence the final result. What you can control is the amount of effort you put into your work and your routine. In The Art of Living, Epictetus says:

“Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can’t control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible.”

Bottom Line:

Time is more valuable than money. Protect your time like it’s your money. It’s the most valuable thing you’ve got.

Important tasks beat urgent tasks. Just because you completed 100 unnecessary things does not mean you were productive. It simply means you wasted your time doing things that aren’t propelling you forward.

You’re only in control of so much. You can’t control whether or not you’re a success, but you can focus on executing your work in a way that will enable you to put yourself on the path to success.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day, you can utilize that time to create something of value, or you can waste your time and end up wasting your whole life. Leave a trail of accomplishments behind you, not regrets.

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