I Didn’t Lack Time, I Lacked Desire

I always find time to do the things I want

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Time is the mother of scarcity.

You can never have more. You’ll never get a do-over. You can’t pause it.

Time management then is clearly a good idea. But I reckon maximizing time efficiency is a great idea. I came across the concept of “Overall Equipment Efficiency”, or OEE recently. Here’s an example:

• Let’s assume I am a piece of equipment with the sole purpose of “writing”. (Isn’t that what a writer is, economically speaking?)
• In 2022, I wrote 50 articles averaging 500 words, which took me roughly an hour each to write. So, 50 hours of writing.
• 8,760 hours in a year, of which I spent 5,840 hours either working or sleeping.
• I probably spent roughly 1,500 hours last year socializing, driving, reading, working out, lazing, Netflixing, cooking, and generally “living.”
• Whilst I self-identify as a writer, I only wrote for 50 out of the remaining 1,400 hours in the year — a whopping 3.5% OEE.
• Not entirely unsurprisingly, my revenue from writing in 2022 was roughly 3.5% of my overall revenue.

In other words, the economic value of my writing roughly equals my OEE as a writer.