Time Anxiety: Beating the Dread That You’ll Never Get Ahead | Chris Guillebeau
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Thank you so much for joining us today. Her guide today, New York Times bestselling author of Time Anxiety, Chris Guillebeau, says the anxiety you feel about time has almost nothing to do with how much of it you actually have. In this episode, you'll discover why your brain is chronically wrong about how long anything takes and the 15-minute fix for chronic lateness. the eight-day exercise that reveals what you actually want to do with your time. You'll learn a simple traffic light method for working with your energy instead of fighting it. And the real reason, get up an hour earlier, backfires for so many people. And finally, why doing some things poorly on purpose might be the smartest decision you make all week.
So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. And we'll jump in right after this short break. How can we actually approach this differently? The focus that you've been really digging into over the last chunk of years and the focus of your new book, Time Anxiety, is what you term time anxiety. Take me into this. What are we actually talking about when we're talking about time anxiety?
I think we're talking about a couple of things. One is the fear of running out of time. So kind of the existential, there's not enough time in my life for the things that I want to do. Or there's something I should be doing right now, but I'm not sure quite what it is. Or maybe I have some regrets over something that I did or shouldn't have done or should have done, you know, years ago. And now I feel like it's too late. And so I have this this, you know, ever present anxiety. I don't quite know what to do about it. And the other part is, what do I do right now? Like, what do I do next? You know, of all the things that I could be doing. How do I actually not just structure my day, but just make some decisions?
And, you know, I feel overwhelmed. And it's not so much a productivity problem. That's how a lot of people try to approach or solve it. And then if you go down that road, you end up getting really good at doing the wrong things, perhaps. I've done that certainly in my life. But it's much more of how do we make choices? How do we know what actually matters? How does what we do now connect to something that ultimately matters to us? And so you've got the existential kind, you've got the day-to-day kind, and I feel like this is just very, very common. And when I first came up with the phrase and started just playing with it a little bit and just talking with people, I noticed that... Uh, like it wasn't just me, like almost everybody that I talked to probably more than any, any other book that I've worked on, you know, in 15 years, just about everybody I talked to was like, I have that, you know, and maybe I have more of the first kind or more of the second kind, but like one way or another, I have that.
And they started using some phrases that, um, just were very common also. And, uh, I just talked to so many people and they would all say the same thing about like, this is, this is me all the time, or my friends and I talk about this, but we never had a name for it. Um, this is the defining problem of my life sometimes people would say. And so that's why I was so interested in it. Um, just from the perspective of studying it, but I also don't come to it like intellectually. I come to it just from my own struggle in life. And, um, you know, how do I resolve this for myself?
Yeah, I mean, and I do think it's so pervasive, certainly in my life. You know, I remember it was actually last year having a conversation with Liz Gilbert, who had asked me to write a piece for her, a wonderful sub stack, Letters from Love, where you write a letter from love to yourself. And the thing that just popped into my mind when I thought about what would I write about was, is this feeling of feeling like I've fallen behind in my own life. You know, like I had expectations when I was a kid, when I was in my twenties, my thirties, like this is where I would be.
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