We give away what's most important for free
The only thing we really have is time and attention
People are very protective of their assets. They check their bank balances, negotiate prices, insure their homes, and calculate expenses. If someone tried to take their money, their car, or a piece of land, they would react quickly.
We deal with time completely differently.
We spend an hour on a pointless meeting. Dozens of hours on TV shows that contribute nothing to our lives. Hundreds of hours on games. Thousands of hours scrolling on our phones.
There is a paradox in this.
Money can be made again. Companies can be rebuilt. Things can be bought back.
The hour that has just passed will never return.
Seneca wrote about this almost 2,000 years ago:
“Everything, Lucilius, is not ours, only time is our property.”
And for me this is one of those banal truths that are easy to understand, but much more difficult to live by.
There will be no more time
Time only works in one direction.
I'm a big believer in delayed gratification. Sometimes in life, you have to spend months doing things that don't yet yield results. Educate yourself, build a brand, create a product, invest, or work on processes.
The problem begins when deferred gratification turns into permanent postponement of life.
Your work should improve your life over time.
If your career or business is growing and you have less and less time, more and more stress, and fewer and fewer opportunities to do what you really enjoy, it's worth asking yourself an uncomfortable question:
Why am I actually doing this?
A career and a company should be tools for building a better life. If a tool begins to consume the life of the person who created it, something was probably poorly designed.
Seneca put this problem even more sharply:
“While we postpone life, it passes by.”
We give away the greatest good for free
We have a lot of time in life, but we give it away generously. Importantly, a significant portion of it is taken up not only by responsibilities but also by our own habits and simple carelessness.
Screens keep flashing notifications all day long.
We sell our time at work and then use the money we earn to buy things we don't need.
We follow the media dramas of politicians, celebrities and people we don't know, even though we have no influence on their lives, and they usually have no real influence on ours.
Studies from various groups show that screens can absorb several hours a day.
In one study, young adults used smartphones an average of 4 hours and 36 minutes per day. In a study of adults in Brazil, television viewing alone took up about 2.2 hours per day. Among adult gamers in another study, the average gaming time was almost 4 hours per day.
The scale becomes impressive when we convert it into years.
Activity | Daily | Annually | For 60 years |
Telephone, young adults | 4 hours 36 minutes | 1679 hours | 11.5 years |
TV, adults | 2 hours 12 minutes | 803 hours | 5.5 years |
Gaming, adult gamers | 3 hours 48 minutes | 1387 hours | 9.5 years |
Gaming, Teens in Spanish Study | 47 min | 286 hours | about 2 years |
These numbers show one important thing.
Four hours a day sounds innocuous. Over the course of a year, that's over 60 full days.
Time usually does not disappear in large chunks, but rather escapes little by little.
Attention Economy
The modern digital economy has another interesting feature: our attention has itself become a commodity.
Since modern humans no longer spend their entire lives struggling to survive, and essential goods are readily available, global corporations have found another way to profit from us. The attention economy is a real economic concept that treats human attention as a limited resource and the most scarce commodity in the digital world.
That's why technology platforms, social media, and advertisers no longer compete just for money, but for users' time. Their primary goal is to influence our purchasing decisions, which they achieve by capturing our attention. There are only 24 hours in a day, so every app competes for the smallest fraction of a second of our attention span.
Moreover, research shows that tired people are more likely to succumb to shopping temptations. Research shows that with limited cognitive resources, automatic reactions and emotions begin to play a greater role.
For this reason, platform creators deliberately use distraction techniques – the constant excess of information is intended to lead to overstimulation and distraction.
Remember: if something is free, you are probably the product. We pay for supposedly free services with our time, attention, and personal data.
When using social media, it's worth asking yourself one key question:
Have I consciously decided that I want to devote my time to this?
It's one thing to watch a movie you really wanted to see, and quite another to wake up an hour later with the feeling that you've just mindlessly devoured 70 short recordings that you remember nothing about.
In the first case, you're the one using your time. In the second, someone has effectively designed a product to extract that time from you.
Attention is equally important
Diligence does not guarantee results.
You can work twelve hours a day and still misuse your time.
If something distracts you every few minutes, it makes it much harder to do anything that requires deep concentration.
Therefore, it is worth separating two resources: time and attention.
You can have time without attention.
An hour of complete concentration on an important problem can be more effective than several hours of work interrupted by messages and switching between tasks.
Every distraction has a cost.
Research on interruptions shows that upon returning, the brain must reconstruct the task context and recall the goal it was working towards. The longer and more demanding the interruption, the greater the cost of returning.
Researchers even describe the phenomenon of resumption lag , which is a measurable delay associated with returning to a previously performed task.
Today, there's a lot of talk about deep work . The idea is incredibly simple: for a set period of time, you do one important thing and minimize anything that tries to distract you.
In practice, this means very simple things:
turning off notifications,
limiting the number of meetings,
reserving parts of the day for work that no one can interrupt.
It sounds trivial, like most good rules.
Only when you try to use them consistently for several years do you see how much they change the way you work.
Take time and attention more seriously than money
A person can spend half an hour looking for a product that is 20 PLN cheaper, and then without a second thought, spend three hours on something that gives him neither pleasure, development, nor money.
That's why it's worth starting to think about time a little more investment-wise.
When you wake up in the morning, think:
"What will I spend my time on today and will it be a good investment?"
At the beginning of many projects, we do everything at once, but over time it is worth doing more and more often activities where our time brings greater results.
First, you eliminate things that consume a lot of time but make little difference. Then you delegate some of the work. You automate the repetitive. You reallocate the reclaimed time to where it's truly needed.
And once you sort it out, the whole process begins again. Because you can always find better uses for your time and attention.
Seneca uses a very good metaphor at the end of his letter:
“It's too late to save when you're at rock bottom.”
It is worth learning to manage your time before it becomes dramatically scarce.
Focus and restraint lead to success
People who achieve success and fulfill their dreams have the same day as everyone else.
They do this by managing their time and attention well - and they can consciously decide what they will not do.
The entire economy is a trade in limited resources that have alternative uses:
If you say “yes” to another project, you are giving away hours that you would not devote to developing the current one.
If you say “yes” to another meeting, you won’t use that time for work that requires concentration.
If you give up three hours to your screen every evening, those same three hours won't magically appear in the morning.
People who effectively pursue their goals simply consciously decide what they will not do and spend their time where it provides the most benefits.
Five rules that I try to follow myself
I limit technological overstimulation. I turn off unnecessary notifications and try not to have screens on all the time. On social media, I prefer to create rather than endlessly consume other people's content.
I abandon projects with no future. It's easy to fall into the trap of sunk costs, sticking with something just because we've invested a lot of time or money in it. Giving up on a dead project makes room for something better.
I try not to live someone else's life. I focus mainly on what I can actually influence or what truly impacts my life. It's worth asking sometimes how much difference following political or celebrity dramas from years past has made in our lives. If not much, perhaps today's dramas don't deserve as much attention either.
I'm limiting my consumption. Every item costs more than just money. It also costs the portion of life needed to earn that money. So before buying, it's worth asking: Do I really need it?
I'm not turning everything into productivity. If you're building a company to live better, time spent walking, listening to music, exercising, reading, or spending time with loved ones can be one of the best investments. It's important that it's a conscious decision.
Once in a while, audit your time
Life isn't about not wasting a single minute.
This is unreal.
Sometimes you watch a stupid movie, go to a pointless meeting, or spend half a day doing something that later turns out to be completely unnecessary.
What is more important is to know roughly where the time disappears.
It is worth doing a similar audit of your own life from time to time, reviewing your calendar for the last few weeks and asking:
What actually moved me forward?
Is the way I spend my time leading me to the life I truly want?
What did I do just out of habit?
How much time and attention have I allowed the media and technology to take away?
Which tasks generate the most value from one hour of my work?
What takes up a lot of my time that shouldn't?
Seneca wrote almost two thousand years ago that the worst waste of time comes from one's own negligence.
Today we have many more tools for wasting it.
That's why it's worth looking after it a little more consciously.
So I hope that if you read this text to the end, it was a good one
investment of your time.
Data and sources
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius , Letter I.
Danielle L. Harvey, K. Milton, A. Jones, A. Atkin, 2021, Preventive Medicine : International trends in screen-based behaviors from 2012 to 2019 .
C. Pieh, E. Humer, Andreas Hoenigl et al., 2025, BMC Medicine : Smartphone screen time reduction improves mental health: a randomized controlled trial .
PC Cardoso, TCM Caldeira, TM de Sousa, R. Claro, 2023, American Journal of Health Promotion : Changes in Screen Time in Brazil: A Time-Series Analysis 2016-2021 .
Fernando Gómez-Gonzalvo, Pere Molina, J. Devís-Devís, 2020, Entertainment Computing : Which are the patterns of video game use in Spanish school adolescents?
Haylei Scoggins, Ryan R. Porter, R. Braun-Trocchio, 2025, Frontiers in Sports and Active Living : Gameplay and physical activity behaviors in adult video game players .
C. Monk, J. Trafton, D. Boehm-Davis, 2008, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied : The effect of interruption duration and demand on resuming suspended goals .
E. Altmann, J. Trafton, 2006, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review : Timecourse of recovery from task interruption: Data and a model .
K. Vohs, R. Faber, 2007, Journal of Consumer Research : Spent Resources: Self-Regulatory Resource Availability Affects Impulse Buying .
G. Iyer, Markus Blut, S. Xiao, Dhruv Grewal, 2019, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science : Impulse buying: a meta-analytic review .
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