What We Get Wrong About Time

Introduction

Today, I want to share a valuable lesson about time from a giant tree. Not Groot, but redwoods. If you drive down the Avenue of the Giants in Northern California, you’ll find yourself weaving in and out of some of the most majestic, gigantic redwood trees you’ll ever see.

The Lesson from the Redwoods

As you’re driving down the Avenue of the Giants, you’ll eventually stop at a nondescript gift shop along the side of the road, and this is where things get even crazier. You’ll encounter a slice of a redwood tree standing on its side. This tree has a diameter of nine feet and was over 300 feet tall at the time of its felling, the length of a football field.

The first observation you’d make: “Sweet sassy molassy, this tree is gigantic.” The next jaw-dropping moment happens when you get closer and notice its concentric rings. As we all learned in grade school biology class, the rings of a tree can tell us the tree’s age: each ring represents a year and tells a story.

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This is where the fun happens. Scattered across this dissection of the tree are little name tags, identifying key moments in history, starting in the center and working its way outward. From “Vikings Discover America” to “Oxford University Founded,” “Genghis Khan conquers Persia,” and so on, to the founding of the California National Parks System in 1927, and beyond.

Here you can see the entirety of modern history, separated by a few feet within tiny concentric rings inside a 1000+ year old tree. It’s wild that from the perspective of a tree, just a few feet (1 meter) separate “Vikings reaching America,” and modern life 1000+ years later. Zoomed out, it’s wild to see how insignificant this time gap is.

We’ve Got Time Wrong

We humans are really good at worrying about what we can get accomplished today, what we ate for ONE meal, what’s important this week, or how much we can change in a month. From the perspective of a 1000 year old tree, these time frames are comically short and insignificant. If trees could laugh (like the Ents of Fangorn Forest), they would laugh at us.

This realization had me thinking about time and how to reframe the timeline on which I think about stuff. As I talked about in a recent newsletter about the additive method for habit building, I’m in the process of building a meditation habit.

Extend Your Time Horizon

Here are two of my favorite quotes about time:

* Bill Gates: “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
* Daniel Hofstadter: “Hofstadter’s Law dictates it will always take longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Everybody is in such a rush to see how many weeks or months it will take to get in shape. Or how long they need to go on a diet to lose the weight, and then they can go back to “normal eating.” Reality plays out differently: things will always take longer than we want, so we should change how we think about it.

Instead of “how fast can I get there,” we should be thinking “what’s the least amount of work I can do today, to help me be in better shape a year from now?” If we change our time horizon, paradoxically we often end up making more progress, more permanently.

Conclusion

If everything takes longer than expected, then we should probably pick reasonable goals, sustainable routines, and enjoyable activities that we won’t mind doing for a much longer period of time. By extending our time horizon, we can reframe our thinking and make more progress in the long run.

FAQs

Q: What’s one area of my life that I’m thinking about on a short term time scale, that would benefit from thinking on a far longer horizon?
A: A short term crash diet, vs. long term reevaluation of your relationship with food. An unsustainable workout program vs building a daily habit of movement. Agonizing over small decisions that won’t matter a month from now, let alone a year from now.

Q: How can I apply this concept to my daily life?
A: By asking yourself “Will this matter 6 months from now? A year from now? A decade from now?” and extending your time horizon, you can reframe your thinking and make more progress in the long run.

Q: What’s the takeaway from this article?
A: That we often get time wrong by focusing on short-term goals and timelines, and that by extending our time horizon, we can make more progress and achieve our goals more sustainably.