The First 2 Hours

Chapter 3Design your best day

In 2011, the film In Time was released starring Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake. The plot is in the future, with people being engineered to stop ageing on their twenty-fifth birthday. After they turn twenty-five, they have to ‘earn’ time in order to keep living — they have a clock on their forearm measuring how much time they have left, and when it reaches zero, that person ‘times out’, or drops dead.

Time is the universal currency in this movie, and can be earned through work, transferred between people or saved onto ‘time capsules’. A cup of coffee could cost three minutes, and buying a house could cost you 30 years.

Some people live day to day, while others are immortal, with tens of thousands of years on their clock. Those considered poor are always running to ‘save time’, while the rich have enough time to meander down the streets, window shopping.

I think about this film a lot, not necessarily because of the acting, script writing or cinematography, but because of this basic premise.

If time were a currency, would you think differently about how or where you spent it?

Would you continue to accept meeting requests and fill your calendar without thinking about how much time you give, to whom and when? Or would you be thoughtful and considered about when you scheduled meetings? (My book The 25 Minute Meeting can help with this.)

We need to think differently about how we manage our time, the same way we are encouraged to manage our money ...