The Art of Stopping Time summary

Picture your life as a garden. In this garden, you’re trying to grow some “plants.” Each plant is something you want to cultivate in your life – your career, health, relationships, hobbies, and anything else that’s important to you.

But here’s the problem. Your “life garden” has limited space – room for only about five to ten plants. And you only have so much “water” for your plants. The water is your time, energy, and attention. So, how do you help your garden to flourish? Well, the secret to success boils down to two words: resource management.

Have you ever worked in the business world or played the stock market? If so, you’ve probably heard the term return on investment before, or ROI for short. It’s basically a measure of how much profit you make when you invest money in a stock option or business venture. The goal, of course, is to get more money out of the investment than you put into it. The bigger the return, the better the ROI.

A similar logic applies to how we invest our time. Now, here are the million-dollar questions: What’s your ROI on how you invest your time? And what’s your time investment strategy? Do you even have one?

Wait a minute, you might be thinking. Do we really have that much choice in how we spend our time? 

After all, most of us have many obligations to fulfill and packed schedules to complete. Going to work, meeting deadlines, picking up groceries, returning phone calls – the list goes on and on. Even in our so-called “free time,” we don’t seem to have much freedom. 

Alright, you might say. Maybe I can take back some of my time. But that’s just nibbling around the edges of my day. Most of it’s full of obligations I can’t get out of, and I can’t really change them.

For many of us, going to work is an obvious case in point. Short of working from home, starting a business, or winning the lottery, that’s just something you’ve got to do, right?

Now, maybe you’re one of those lucky people who doesn’t have a morning commute. But even if you get to work from home in your pajamas, you still experience numerous situations per day where you’re waiting for something else to happen. If it’s not waiting for the customer service agent to pick up the phone, then it’s waiting for the elevator to open, the waiter to bring the check, or the microwave to finish.

Many of these experiences last just a few seconds or minutes, but they all add up, and they present us with a question: How do we fill up all of that empty time?

Take some deep breaths into your lower abdomen. Check in with yourself.

If that final part of the last blink sounded familiar to you, there’s a reason for that. It was basically a mini-mindfulness exercise.

Alright, after all that talk about mortality, let’s start this blink on a lighter note.

Has this ever happened to you? You sit down for a meal – pizza, let’s say. You’re eating quickly, without thinking. Maybe you’re doing something on your phone. Suddenly, you look down at your plate and realize the last slice of pizza is already gone.

How’d you spend your morning today? If you’re like many people, you might have spent a lot of it in the shower. Many of us spend so much time in there that our bathrooms look like a steam room by the end.

Now, taking these long, hot showers on a daily basis is obviously bad for the environment. If you’ve got chlorine in your water supply, it’s not so good for your body either, since your skin can absorb the chemicals. But there’s an even deeper problem going on here, and it brings up a more general point that’s going to help us tie everything in these blinks together.