Time Management Strategies From the Stoics

On today’s episode of the podcast Ryan talks about the different time management strategies that come to us from the Stoics. LMNT is the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. As a listener of this show, you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked. Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com /stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Today, we're exploring a better approach to time management. Why time management? Because management of time is the most important thing that there is. Time is not your most valuable possession. In a sense, it's your only possession. Everything else, your job, your house, your car, your family, can be taken from you. Another way to think about this is, time is the only thing you can't get more of. You can earn more money. You can buy new things. You can make new things. As Napoleon said, "Space I can recover, time never."

• 1:42Ryan Holiday?

  This moment is not just important, but all moments are important. And the time that we waste, the time that we don't manage well, is time we never get back. Seneca, one of the Stoic philosophers, has this brilliant way of putting time management in perspective. You know, he says, "Don't think about death as something that happens in the far-off, distant future that you're moving towards." He says, "No, death, death is happening right now." He says, "The time that passes belongs to death. It belongs to eternity. It can never be yours again." So, in a sense, he said, "We're dying every day. We're dying every minute."

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  So then, this question of how we manage our time becomes not just essential, but it becomes the main question. You know, Seneca says that, you know, if your neighbor stole a piece of your property or damaged something that you own, you'd be very upset by that. And you'd get it back, you'd try to get it back. But we, we let people steal our time. We let people interrupt our time all the time. And that's, that's the thing we can't get back. And then, if that weren't enough, if that weren't crazy enough, how much of our own time do we waste as well?

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  You know, as we're killing time, time is killing us. So how can we decide then to seize this moment in front of us? Carpe diem, as the Latin expression goes, seize the day. The tricky part is that time is constantly escaping us. But the, the exciting part is that, that time is ours. Even when we're stuck in prison, or inside during a pandemic, or stuck at an airport while we're waiting on a flight, or in a job you don't love, you still own your time. You still decide what you're gonna do with your time. You choose how you're going to live. For the Stoics, it's this choice, the choice between using our time and killing it,

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  that's so essential. As we think about time, a key element then is priority. What's, what is the most important thing to you?

• 4:05Ryan Holiday?

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• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  Plus, you'll get five free travel packs with your first purchase. Simply visit athleticgreens.com/stoic. Join us in making this commitment to your health. Just go to athleticgreens.com/stoic and get your free year's supply of vitamin D plus five free travel packs today. I gave a talk a few years ago to the Los Angeles Rams. And one of the team values for the Rams is keep the main thing, the main thing. I think that's a great expression, and it's a key one to think about when it comes to time management. What's the main thing for you? Now, look at your day. Look at your schedule. It would be interesting if people had to keep a time diary.

• 5:32Ryan Holiday?

  You know, when we're trying to lose weight, we're trying to look at our nutrition, a nutritionist might have us do a bit of a food diary. What did you eat? Count your calories. Track your macros. Where are you consuming calories? And are they the right calories? And then what does your exercise regime and all that need to look like? But where are you spending your time? When you look back at your calendar, does it reflect your priorities?

• 5:57Ryan Holiday?

  Is it a schedule conducive at all to getting the things that you want to get done? Done? No, it's funny. We, as Seneca says, "We are frugal in guarding our personal property." But then, when it comes to squandering time, we're the most wasteful of the one thing we have the most right to be stingy about. And so, when you look at your calendar, when you look at your day, what are you spending it on? Are you spending it on your partner who you claim to love? Are you spending it on the dream that you want to achieve in your life? Or are you frittering it away on frivolous things? Things that perhaps you could hire someone to help you with? Things that, responsibilities that you don't actually need to hold anymore?

• 6:39Ryan Holiday?

  Inefficiencies that you could address or improve? These are, when we manage our time, we have to understand what a precious resource we are optimizing. It can feel difficult to spend money on ourselves, to spend money on paying someone to do something for us. But if it gets us back our most valuable possession, well then, that's a hell of a deal. It can be unpleasant to question the way we do things at our work and our personalized habits that we formed. But from that discomfort can come improvement, can come a better way of doing things. If we are careless and lazy and keep putting things off

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  and always deferring the day to which we're going to attend to ourselves. Epictetus, one of the Stoic philosophers, says, "We will not make progress and we will live and die as someone quite ordinary." Look, the reason you have to be ruthless about your time, you have to be strong, you have to be confident, you have to demand, not just of yourself, better time management, but you can't let other people steal this precious resource from you or waste it without getting a return on that investment.

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  Is that you were put here to do something important, and you can do something important, and you are capable of doing more than you are. But that's gonna come from focus, that's gonna come from better management, that's gonna come from prioritization, from the clarity that comes, from knowing what's essential and what's inessential, from knowing how short this life is, from knowing how little you can afford to waste on things that don't matter. Me, I try to keep my days simple. I know that the more things I have in my calendar, the less time I have for my writing, and the less time I have for my family. I like the white space of my calendar, that white space, that autonomy. That's me time.

• 8:35Ryan Holiday?

  That's time to do what I know I'm meant to do. When I look at people whose lives are over-scheduled down to the minute, over-committed beyond any and all capacity, I see what Seneca said. I see someone winning, but winning at the cost of life, and that's sad. So we have to decide what's important to us, but then we have to make sure that our schedules, our lives, our decisions, what we say yes to, what we say no to, we have to make sure that those things are aligned. Remember, when you say yes to one thing, you're saying no to something else. And conversely, when you say no to something, you can be saying yes to something else. So we manage our time, we manage our priorities, because if we don't, it manages us. And if we manage to waste this gift we have,

• 9:20Ryan Holiday?

  this moment, this brief, brief life that we have, well, one day we'll realize, we may soon realize what a huge mistake we made, and by then, it will be too late. As we close this meditation on time management, we should think of one final line from Seneca. He said, "Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books each day. Let's live now while we can, efficiently, effectively, and around the things that truly matter to us."

• 9:56Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. If you want to take your study of Stoicism to the next level, I want to invite you to join us over at Daily Stoic Life. We have daily conversations about the podcast episodes, about the daily email. We actually do a special weekend set of emails for everyone. You get all our daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free. That's hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge, which we're going to launch in January. You get a special cloth-bound edition of the best of meditations that we've done. You get a bunch of cool stuff. It's an awesome community. I've loved being a part of it. I've loved getting to meet everyone who's trying to take their study of Stoicism to the next level. Love to have you join us. Check us out at DailyStoicLife.com.

• 10:39Ryan Holiday?

  We'd love to have you and join us on this digital stoah that we've staked out together and get better every day.