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A recurrent theme among the blogs I subscribe to seems to be "what would you do if you knew you only had X time to live?" If you really knew how much time you had left, would you waste so much of it? Some people might find it macabre, but Kevin Kelly outlines a way to calculate how many days you have left based on Life Expectancy Tables. Using that information (and using my last birthday as a base) I calculated I have 13,813 days left to live. I took Box of Crayon's advice and put a countdown timer on my desktop that shows me how many days I have left. It surprised me how motivating that number is.
For example, I don't have a lot of work to do today – and none of it is urgent. Usually I would stretch the work I have out to fill the day by doing a little, checking Facebook, do a little more work, check out Stumble Upon, do a little more… you get the idea. I actually started to do that, but then I saw my countdown time and decided to take today off from work completely. I expect more work in tomorrow and I'm far more productive when I have a lot to do. Instead of frittering away the majority of today, I'm working on some of my non-work related goals, like blogging daily, taking a walk, working on some neglected classes, cleaning house. By day's end I should feel better about my day than I would have if I'd just gone through my regular routine. I won't have wasted all that precious time. The other amazing thing about looking at how long you have is best described in Kevin Kelly's own words:My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?
I have about 37 more years. That is 7 (SEVEN!) Big Things. What will those big things be? The scope is exciting, isn't it? The energy of it just lifts me out of the current quagmire of day to day life to see the bigger picture.