So you’ve spent a few hours worrying rather than beginning something? Turn over a new leaf. In How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Bennett writes: ‘The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career … You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.’ What has been helpful for me in such moments is to remember that time cannot be wasted in advance - a sentiment I’ve borrowed from Arnold Bennett. What if we let ourselves spend time the way we please? (Picture: Getty/.uk)īut is spending all our time on things that aren’t fulfilling really a good use of our limited days? Perhaps it’s better to do something we want to do, even if it fails? Surely it’s better at least to try than let time pass us by.Įven the notion of time passing us by can fling us into worry about all the time we’ve let pass by. In a society that emphasises the productive use of time, we can easily forget that time we enjoyed wasting is not wasted time.Īnd what a pity it is when we don’t even start something because we fear it will be a waste of time - for example, we never begin writing our novel because we worry it will never get published, or we don’t start learning a language because we expect we’ll never visit the country where it’s spoken. We don’t have to view every moment we don’t spend the way we expected to as a waste - we can simply appreciate the part it played in our life. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in The Little Prince: ‘It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.’ When we worry about wasting time, we end up wasting our time worrying.īut we also judge how we spend our time rather harshly, lumping everything that isn’t deemed a productive use of our time as a waste, when there may be value in those moments too. We are bound to waste time - we put things off, take too long to start, become distracted, overlook the efficient route, run late, scroll, chitchat too long with a colleague at lunch. ‘I might have all these things to do on a given day, but if the sun is shining, I’ll convince myself it is imperative that I make use of the sunshine,’ she says, then adds with a smile, ‘But that’s living, right?’ Engineer, author and activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied has a tendency to ‘waste time’ by binge-watching YouTube videos and The Daily Show, or doing things that are nice to do but not necessarily required.
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