How to measure out your life

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I’m often asked: Why Big Days and not, you know … something else. Big Hours. Or Big Months. Why this particular unit of time? Is there something especially significant, something magical, about the period of 24 hours? Are we Homo Diem creatures at our core?

I have a few answers to that. Just in practical terms, as a git-’er-done prime, a day’s a nice chunk: you can knock off a significant task in a single concentrated push. I reckon there’s also something poetic about one spin of the Earth: from light to dark to light again: that feels like a microcosm of a whole life. People have been thinking in these terms for a very long time. I suppose that’s why we say Seize the Day! and not, you know, Seize the Fortnight!

But ultimately, the answer is no. There’s nothing uniquely beneficial to thinking in days. I do believe it’s useful to mentally fillet our alloted three-score-and-ten into smaller bits than that that (we simply cannot get our head around a whole lifespan), but what those bits are is a personal choice.

Oliver Burkeman found it handy – and lucrative! – to portion the lifespan into weeks: the 4,000 or so of them that we get, on average. (If you think of each week of your life as a .05 carat diamond – the size one might find in an engagement ring – then a life’s worth of diamonds would fit in a tablespoon. The moral: You don’t have as long as you think you have.) Many Buddhists would say that the only unit of time that really matters is the moment. This one, now.

There’s value in exploring in both directions – thinking small and thinking big. Tim Urban has made a cottage of industry of presenting long timelines such a way that you can appreciate their largeness – and strangely, at the same time, their ephemerality. “I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem “Possibilities.”

So let’s cover the spread, shall we? Depending on your circumstances, it might make sense to consider your life in increments of …

FIVE MINUTES Action-kindling time. The time it takes to get going. “You have five minutes to act on a new idea before it disappears from your mind,” claims the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly. Habits guru James Clear claims it’s how long it takes to break out of a rut if you’re stuck. “It only takes five minutes to break the cycle. Five minutes of exercise and you are back on the path. Five minutes of writing and the manuscript is moving forward again. Five minutes of conversation and the relationship is restored.”

SIX MINUTES Lawyer time. If you’re ruthlessly transactional you could take a cue from the legal profession, which tends to bill in six-minute increments. It’s the smallest practical unit you can say, with a straight face, that you did “work.” (Cut it any finer and you’d mostly be keeping track of time, not working.)

EIGHT MINUTES Photon time. Eight minutes – actually just a shade over – is 1 AU, or Astronomical Unit, the time it takes sunlight to reach Earth. I use this quirky time interval as a motivator. If I’m struggling toward the end of a workout, I slip into “beat the photon” mode. Eight minutes: that much I can grind out. If I can’t run a mile in the time it takes light to travel 93 million of ‘em, it’s time to take up walking.

TEN MINUTES IKEA time. Ingvar Kamprad, the IKEA founder, claimed anything smaller than ten minutes was just trims and ends. But ten minutes, that you could make functional use of. “Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES Book-cheat time. One “blink”: that’s the time unit invented by the internet site “Blinkist,” corresponding to the amount of time it figures busy people are willing to devote to a (nonfiction) book. So that’s how long Blinkist makes the reading time for its book summaries: fifteen minutes.

TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES Attention time. A favourite time interval of the efficiency tribe, as there’s some evidence that few people can sustain focussed attention after that. After 25 minutes, users of the “pomodoro technique” hear a gentle ding-a-ling from their tomato alarm, alerting them that they’re now getting diminishing returns and it’s time to take a break. Twenty-five minutes also happens to be the “coffee interval” (i.e, about the time it takes caffeine to kick in.) T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock may have been on to something, measuring his life in coffee spoons.

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES Class time. The time horizon of a school-age kid tends to be around, well, one school period (around forty-five minutes), according to the parenting guru Becky Kennedy. (Further support for the idea that how our environmental cues are structured determine the units of time we think in.)

ONE HOUR Dream time. Sixty minutes: anyone, no matter how busy, can carve that out of a day for self-betterment, goes a theory as old as self-help itself. “You can achieve any of your dreams in just an hour a day,” claims writer/blogger Marelisa Fabrega. William Blake – “an eternity in an hour…” – might have agreed.

NINETY MINUTES Body time. Astronauts have a special affinity for the time period of ninety minutes. If you’re aboard the space station ninety minutes IS a day – sunrise to sunrise; you get sixteen days in a day up there. But this increment has a special pull even down here on earth. This is the unit of the body’s ultradian rhythm – so significant one might credibly argue it’s the temporal denominator of human life. Throughout the day and night, our energy flows and ebbs according to our natural ninety-minute cycles, and with a little practice we can learn to tune in to them and calibrate our efforts accordingly. (Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr have an interesting book on this.)

A QUARTER-DAY Football time. A football game has four quarters. Gretchen Rubin, the happiness maven, suggests thinking of your days like that: you have morning, midday, afternoon and evening. “If you lose one quarter, or even two quarters, you can still reclaim the day by winning the others.” You can even salvage a day by winning a single quarter. Reduce the size of your failures. “Fail small.”

A LONG WEEKEND Build up / tear down time. There’s an Australian aboriginal saying: “civilization is only three days’ deep.” You need to be away from the city for three days before you can really shed the reflexes / habits / ruts / demands of modern life and start settling into something like the ancient primitive rhythms that connected humans to the land. (Another way to look at that is, our whole manufactured life as civilized people is a lot more fragile than we think.) Going in the other direction, major companies – including Air B & B – have been created in three days or less.

A MICROSEASON Nature time. The earth’s rhythms are way more granular than just the four seasons. In Japan, the calendar year is broken into 72 subdivisions, or “microseasons.” In a single week you can pass through two or three of them. (For example, “Feb. 4 to 8: east wind melts the ice; Feb 9 to 13: bush warblers start singing in the mountains.”) Nature was our timepiece way longer than anything else has been. That’s why this one feels so right.

SIXTY-SIX DAYS Habit-creation time. The 66-day unit: that’s how long some experts claim it takes a habit to form. (The time period actually varies widely, depending on the habit.) Hearteningly, researchers have found that missing once in awhile won’t torpedo the habit. Just don’t miss too may times.

ONE HUNDRED DAYS “Life Interrupted” time. The writer Suleika Jaouad famously thinks in increments of 100 days. The idea hatched while she was suffering through a brutal cancer diagnosis. As a distraction from her illness, and a spirit-lifter, she vowed to “do something creative once a day, every day, for 100 days” – a significant commitment but manageable (just). The interval took on added significance after her bone-marrow transplant; doctors set 100 days as a benchmark for recovery. If she could just reach day 100, she had a reasonable chance of beating this thing. “Survivorship comes with unspoken pressures, responsibilities and challenges,” she said. The hundred-day benchmark reminds us that we are all survivors – just less dramatically.

FIVE MONTHS Semester time. We spend so much of our formative lifespan in school that the semester remains a deeply meaningful unit of time long after the textbooks have been sold for beer money. Segmenting up our lives in five-to-six month intervals has lots of advantages, including the opportunity for fairly frequent debriefs and motivating “fresh starts” “It just helps you feel that you’re growing as a person,” says Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.. “You’re not the person you were three months ago.”

FIVE YEARS Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue and pioneer of the idea of “deep time,” has been arranging his life in blocks of five years. Five years, he maintains, is what he says any project worth doing will take – “from moment of inception to the last good-riddance,” as Brand’s pal Kevin Kelly, who has adopted a similar frame, puts it.

TEN YEARS The Beatles seemed to understand that they had a decade. Ten years to bear down creativity, together, to the exclusion of all, thence to bend the universe and sow delight. It’s not a bad rule of thumb for all of us: Give me a decade and see what I can do.