You Only Get Three Things In Life: Time, Attention, and Choice

19 days ago I stumbled on a blog by a guy named Steve Corona while I was researching my Morning Routine Article, and he mentioned that he wrote 1,000 words every morning—he contributed a lot of his success to that single habit.¹

I was sold immediately.

Start. Especially When It’s Hard

What I didn’t know, was that 1,000 words is a lot.

Not only is it a lot of words, it is a lot of words for any topic.

Writing about a lot of things makes me happy. But sometimes just coming up with ideas to write about is the real challenge.

Today is day 18. And today’s 1,000 words are about the only things we are given in this lifetime: time, attention, and choice.

That’s one of the coolest things I’ve learned through this 1,000-words-a-day experiment is that all you have to do is make a choice of where to spend your time and attention. And if you just start doing the thing (whatever that is for you), things start to happen. Ideas start to flow. Opportunities seem to “magically” appear in your life. Life starts to take on a whole new shape of its own.

But only if you start.

Time, Attention, and Choice Matter in the Morning

Another thing I learned is to do the things that are most important and the most difficult for you, in the morning.

My morning routine is my lifeblood.

Anyone, anywhere who has ever asked me the first thing to do to change their life, I instantly point to the morning. (That includes better sleep and exercise, of course.)

How you start your day is how you play your day.

Some people aren’t morning people. I get it. I never was either. Not. Even. Close. Unless you count going to bed at 3-4 am as being a “morning person”. Nope, I was far from it.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t change.

You can change anything you want if you are willing.²

It’s all training—you have to train your choices on where to spend your time and attention.

And that’s how I arrived at 18 days in a row of writing 1,000 words: training.

I trained myself to do it in the morning because it is important to me.

Choose to do the things that are important to you, in the morning. Use your morning time and attention to focus on your priorities.

As you start to look at your life, you begin to see the choices you have made, and the few things that are really in your control: time, attention, and choice.

That’s it.

Your life is a strange and unique cocktail of what you have done with those three things.

The Three Tools of Life

Everyone’s workshop of life is different, but the tools are the same.

What you give your time and attention to is a choice.

What you choose needs your time and attention.

In every single moment of every single day, you are making choices. If you aren’t aware of how to choose where to spend your time and attention, then it is being chosen for you.

Some people are aware that they are making choices, some are not. But that is still a choice.

Choices are life.

Some are small and insignificant.

And some are seemingly small and insignificant, yet life-altering in time.

Some big and life-changing.

Some are seemingly big and life-changing, yet not so life-changing at all.

Choices come in all different shapes and sizes and are different for everyone.

But the things you choose to spend your time and attention on are what you prioritize—things you have chosen over all of the other things.

If you have children, having children was a priority for you.

And if you are overweight, eating excess calories was a priority for you (whether you were aware of it or not).

If you don’t have any close connections, not having close connections was a priority for you.

If you don’t have enough time, not having enough time was a priority for you.

This might be tough to swallow. It was for me.

But the truth is, whatever is in your life is there because you have prioritized it. You have chosen to spend your time and attention on it. You have chosen it.

Stop Blaming Time

People everywhere complain of “not having enough time.”

I hear it constantly.

In fact, it is so ubiquitous that I started to believe that no one anywhere, ever, in the history of time, ever had enough time. That time was just in short supply. Forever.

But that’s not true.

It’s not true at all.

It’s so cliche, but we all have the exact same amount of time in a day. Every. Single. One. Of. Us. EVER.

If you think you “don’t have enough time” then you are lying to yourself. And that’s not good.

You can’t do that.

But what if it was reframed?

• I have the time, I am just choosing not to spend my time on that.
• I have the time, I am just choosing to prioritize something else in my life right now.
• I have the time, I am just choosing to give my time and attention to something else right now.

This. Changes. Everything.

It puts you back in the driver’s seat of your own life and forces you to take responsibility for everything in your life.

It forces you to see your choices for what they are: your choices.

Most of all, it forces you to stop blaming time.

Use Time, Attention, and Choice or They Use You

I’ve heard people all over the world say, “We don’t have much time because we have kids.”

And this might be 100% true.

But is it?

Every time I hear this I think to myself, “Are they blaming their children for not having enough time?”

Of course, this is not at all what they are doing.

Not at all.

But it sounds that way.

And maybe this plays on their subconscious in a way.

Or what if you have a million things to do at work and you “don’t have enough time” to get some of them done?

Are those things that you can’t get done important?

Or do you just need to adjust how you are spending your time and attention?³

What if you don’t have time to meet a friend?

Is that friend important to you?

Maybe your attention is being stolen by something else.⁴

Or are you actively choosing to spend your time and attention on something else?

And that is all okay.

As long as you understand that you are choosing where to spend your time and attention since you are in control of those three things.

Because we truly are only given three things in life:

Time.

Attention.

Choice.

Use them wisely.

Or they will use you.

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1. https://stevecorona.com/build-your-own-morning-routine ↩︎
2. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolution-of-the-self/202106/10-reasons-you-feel-you-always-have-to-learn-things-the-hard-way ↩︎
3. https://calnewport.com/when-time-management-was-easy/ ↩︎
4. https://markmanson.net/attention-economy ↩︎

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