1,800 Weekends

Part One

Most people who are moving fast have never done the calculation.

Not the career calculation, not the financial one. The time one. The simple, slightly uncomfortable arithmetic of how many weekends, how many mornings, how many ordinary Tuesdays are actually left in a life of average length.

When you do it properly, two things tend to happen. The number is smaller than you expected. And the question of what you are doing with that time becomes harder to move past than it was before you knew the answer.

This is not about mortality in the way people usually mean it. It is not a reminder to be grateful or to slow down or to smell anything in particular. It is something more practical than that. It is a question about allocation. About whether the way you are spending the time you have is actually pointed at the life you want, or whether it has simply accumulated in the direction of least resistance over years of being too busy to examine it closely.

High performers are particularly susceptible to this. Not because they are careless with their time, but because they are so skilled at filling it productively that the question of whether the productivity is pointed at the right things rarely gets asked. The output is there. The momentum is there. The forward motion is continuous.

What tends not to be there, underneath all of it, is a clear and honest answer to the eulogy question.

Not what you would want a colleague to say. Not what would sound right in a room full of people who knew your professional life. What you would actually want to be true about how you spent your time. Who you were present for. What you genuinely enjoyed rather than performed enjoying. Whether the life you built from the outside matched anything recognisable from the inside.

Most people who sit with that question honestly find the gap is wider than they had been acknowledging.

Part Two

The gap is not fixed by doing less. It is not fixed by a holiday, or a restructure, or deciding to leave work earlier on Fridays.

It is fixed by understanding something quite specific about how you are wired, which most people who are moving fast have never had the time or the structure to examine properly.

Every person has a particular configuration. The environment in which they genuinely thrive rather than merely function. The kind of work that energises rather than depletes. The relationships that restore rather than cost. The pace at which the whole system runs well rather than just runs.

Most high performers have never mapped this for themselves. They have operated for years on an inherited set of assumptions about what success looks like and what a good life requires, assumptions that were formed early, rewarded consistently, and never once examined against what is actually true about who they are.

When you understand your own configuration clearly, the allocation question becomes answerable. Not in a theoretical sense but in a daily, practical one. The 1,800 weekends do not feel like a warning. They feel like a useful constraint. A reason to be precise about what they are spent on, and confident that the precision is pointed at something real.

Continue reading: Three Questions →

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