Thinking We Have Time

I thought I had enough time to reach an important meeting, so I left later than I should have.

I thought I had the full year ahead of me, so even if closures did not happen in the early months, I would make up for it later.

I thought I had enough time to study for the final exam, so I decided it was fine to slack off now.

Then traffic happens. Targets slip. Results do not go the way I expect.

When things go wrong, it feels natural to think the world is the source of our problems. Bad traffic. Tough markets. Tight timelines. But almost always, our thinking and our decisions, built on the belief that time is on our side, turn out to be the real culprit.

Instead of treating time as a given and the real world as the problem, maybe it is better to accept the world for what it is and make different decisions about how much time we really have.

Maybe the issue isn’t that life isn’t going according to plan. Maybe it is that we keep assuming we have more time than we actually do.