It’s the most common phrase I hear, from leaders, business owners, professionals and parents, from people who are successful, determined and genuinely invested in their lives. And from myself, more times than I’d like to admit.
After years of sitting with clients in this conversation, here’s what I’ve come to know: the time problem is rarely about time. The deeper question worth sitting with is this: is what I’m engaged in right now time spent or time invested?
The Math First
Laura Vanderkam, in her book 168 Hours, makes a simple and slightly uncomfortable point: we all have 168 hours every week. Everyone.
168 hours is the same number whether you are a CEO in Toronto or a teacher in Tweed.
If the hours are equal, why does it feel like there are never enough?
We aren’t actually managing time. We are in a constant negotiation with attention, energy and permission, and most of us were never taught how.
The Wheel You’re Not Looking At
When clients come to me feeling time-starved, we start with a simple exercise. We look at their whole life, not just their calendar.
Think about everything that makes up your life right now. Work and career. Health and physical activity. Nutrition. Sleep. Relationships, friendships, family, romance. Home, finances, administration. Personal growth, learning, creativity. Spiritual life. Recreation and play. Community and contribution.
These are examples. Your wheel has its own names, your own categories, the things that are genuinely present in your life whether or not you’ve given them a spot on the calendar.
That is your ecosystem. Every one of those areas is real and present, whether you attend to it or not.
Most of us spend our time on work. Meanwhile, the rest of the wheel waits its turn. That waiting creates its own kind of drain, a low hum of incompleteness that follows us into every meeting, every evening, every attempt at rest.
The feeling of not enough time is often the feeling of a life out of alignment with itself.
The Part Nobody Tells You About Energy
It isn’t just about how much time you have. It’s about what you use it for and when.
Research on chronotypes, our individual biological rhythms, shows that most of us have a peak energy window, a trough and a recovery period each day. The timing varies by person while the pattern does not.
At peak energy, we are best suited for analytical work, decisions and complex thinking. When energy dips, we become more creative and more open to unexpected connections. In recovery, routine tasks, administration and emails are the natural fit.
The myth that our most important work belongs first thing every morning is exactly that: a myth. What matters is matching the task to our energy.
Most of us do the opposite. We spend our peak hours in meetings, our creative hours on emails, and our best thinking gets the leftover minutes at the end of the day.
Dan Pink’s research in When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing speaks directly to this. Timing matters more than most of us have been taught to account for.
A personal note: I did the chronotype assessment this week. I’m a wolf. Peak energy in late morning and again in the evening. I have never been a consistent routine person and now I understand why forcing an early morning productivity ritual never quite stuck. It wasn’t a character flaw, it was biology.
One Thing to Try This Week
Before you restructure anything, do one thing.
Find out your chronotype. The Sleepopolis quiz is straightforward and takes less than five minutes: sleepopolis.com/chronotypes-quiz
Then look at your calendar for the coming week and ask one honest question: Are my most demanding tasks landing in my peak energy window?
You don’t need to overhaul anything. Simply notice. Awareness is where the shift begins.
A Closing Thought
The goal of this newsletter is not to give you more to do.
Each issue will bring one grounded idea that might shift something: how you see your time, how you show up to your life, or how the whole of your life fits together rather than competes.
We live an ecosystem. The goal is integration, not optimization.
