An import element of managing an investment portfolio is the minimisation of risk. Money risk is pretty well known, but what about the risk of inefficiently allocating time to negative emotion-inducing activities?

The average person gets about 700k hours over their lifetime to spend on whatever activities tickle their fancy, and then the dark void of the beyond sends a reaper to take them. That sounds like a lot of time, until you remember that a decent night sleep each evening will cost you about 230k of those hours. Work takes another 170k (with only 30% of workers “very satisfied” with their work). Just the simple act of consuming food each day adds up to 28k.

Clearly whatever precious hours survive the obligational onslaught from the universe must be protected, and invested for maximum generation of meaning. Indeed, the only real thing we all optimise towards is “meaning” – the output of connecting your value system to experiences in reality. Since this is one of the main things all of makind has strived for since the dawn of civilisation, it makes sense to spend a minute or two thinking about how we can trade time for it most effectively.

Counter-intuitively, the answer lies not in the incessant worrying about the selection of the most positive, meaningful behaviours to invest energetic hours. Inborn interest, curiosity and operational pleasure will take care of all that. The answer is much more like risk management.

We want to establish reliable habits that automatically protect our time from being spent by the worst, most impulsive parts of our Self. That little degenerate in all of us that wants to throw 4hrs-straight into watching reels on Instagram. Take drinking, for instance. Very few sober people intend on blacking out drunk, but many tipsy people regard the prospect of another drink as rather delightful. A few more to follow seems like an equally divine idea. This is often referred to as a “reinforcing loop” (think interest on savings, population growth, or technological adoption), the opposite of which often arrives the following morning for our dear drinker in the form of a hangover – a “stabilising loop” (predators when prey is overpopulated, forest burn offs, etc.).

Stabilising loops are often an important mechanism for slowing down reinforcing loops. In our drinking example, adding a “stabilising loop” in the form of a glass of water after every drink would neutralise much of the potential risk. But what about switching off the loop all together? A “loop break”?

Suppose this is your mantra;

“Whenever I feel tired and lazy, the only thing that makes me feel better is doing something useful“.

I’m sure you’ve tried wasting more time to make yourself feel less bad about wasting time. We all have, it’s a borderline a compulsive behaviour. Has it ever actually worked for you? Ever?

Image how incredible a person’s life would be if they automatically switched off any negative reinforcing loops while in the loop. It would automatically stop them from experiencing compounding negative effects by cutting of bad behaviour sets at the pass. For some strange reason, I’ve found this not to be as hard as it seems. What’s worked for me is the moment I start to feel the stale, empty weight of wasted time, I immediately jump up (literally) and rush to do the most productive thing I can think of in that moment. No thinking, pure action.

Whenever you see an opportunity to interrupt yourself wasting time, do it! Have fun with it. Take meaning from the fact that you are building a habit that, if taken to the extreme, will protect you against risking a massive amount of your 700k hours on meaningless nonsense.

Take care,

Ky