How I Manage My Time to Travel More
Five questions to find your direction and one 30-minute hack to take action
Friends and travelers — HELLO!
If you joined me last week in uncovering your dream adventure, then I can assume two thoughts are invading your mind now:
Where am I going to find the time to do this?
Where am I going to find the money to do this?
It was the same when I first set my sights on 81 provinces, so I want to address each, starting with time.
We are a limited amount of time.
“If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
We’ve received our marching orders; let us begin from the vantage point of death.
The average life expectancy in the Philippines is 72.12 years or 3,750 weeks and two days.
If you are 25 years old and were born on September 22, 1997 (like me), then by the time this is published, you would have conveniently consumed 1,320 weeks or 35% of your life. No matter how you put it, even assuming you lived to 122 years (6,344 weeks) like Jeanne Calmet, this is a progress bar that will inevitably reach 100%.
We are quite literally a limited amount of time.
The only question is whether we’re willing to confront it or not.
But the real problem isn’t our time.
“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment … Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.”
— Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore & The Russian People and Socialism
The real problem is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and been pressured to live by, the assumption that we are cosmically and invariably significant.
After all, it’s natural to interpret life through the perspective we occupy so that our 3,750 weeks and two days come to feel like the climax of history. We can’t help but compare ourselves to everything that not only exists but has ever existed: We envision ourselves as brilliant as Albert Einstein, as talented as Leonardo da Vinci, as revered as John F. Kennedy, and as athletic as Christiano Ronaldo.
Unfortunately, in believing it is possible to be and do everything, we remove the pressure to consider what matters most. We neglect our power to turn things down, including the more trivial and tedious things, which most commonly consist of things other people want us to do.
Suppose the real problem is doing too many things that don’t truly matter; then, the solution must begin by discovering what matters.
3,750 weeks and two days should be enough to do one or two things.
What matters most?
“You have sales resistance to the dramatic, Brim; the rare gift of contempt for what is urgent. I know of a dozen people who would pay you five thousand a year for telling them every day that what is important is seldom urgent. Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.”
— John le Carré, A Murder of Quality
The above can feel overwhelming, so I want to share an exercise to put things under a more practical perspective.
First, list five things under each question:
What do I want to have?
Who do I want to be?
What do I want to do?
What do I want to achieve?
Where do I want to go?
Next, from this list of 25 things, I want you to choose a maximum of three things to commit your attention to for the next six months. Then intentionally decide to fail on the rest during the same period.
Where did your dream adventure fall?
By this point, travel can only be either of two things to you: the most important thing or a distraction. If it is the most important thing, I want you to own it, and I want to help you do so. If it is not the most important thing, it is a distraction. You must forfeit the right to be jealous of all your friends posting travel stories on Instagram and complaining about how you cannot travel.
However, if reading those words made you uncomfortable, travel is your most important thing, and your challenge is to see it as such.
My 30-minute hack to get sh*t done.
“Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.”
— Tim Ferris, The 4-Hour Workweek
This begs the question, why is it so difficult to do the important things?
The problem lies in our need to feel certain, to know that our efforts will be recognized with a reward, to know in advance that we will be safe and happy. So we wait for certainty before we act. Unfortunately, the nature of important things is uncertainty. Thus making it highly likely that the time your important thing becomes certain is also the time it becomes unimportant.
Another way to look at uncertainty is as the frontier of our comforts. Approaching the point of uncertainty is akin to confronting our limitations, shortcomings, and finitude.
Pursuing a life of travel, for example, forces us to consider how much money we have saved up, how much quality time we will lose from our loved ones, how much freedom we have from our jobs, and how much support our families will need without us.
The way to find peace with our most important thing is to acknowledge this discomfort and to turn more of our attention to the reality of our situation.
The way to find peace is to act. Now.
All I recommend is 30 minutes a week. Find a consistent schedule within your week, set a timer on a countdown for 30 minutes, and give yourself a choice: You can do something about your goal or do nothing. I offer you this choice because it’s okay if you can’t think of anything to work on, but it’s unacceptable for you to work on anything else during this time.
In the beginning, when I first set my sights on visiting all 81 provinces, I allocated 30 minutes every Saturday morning to research 3-day itineraries for every province.
There is no such thing as waste.
“Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way … If that’s what you want, you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what.
... quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.”
— Carl Jung, Letters Volume 1
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you do, only that you do.
The challenge I want to leave with you is to learn how to find meaning in the here and now, to forget of meaning as something you earn once you reach the summit or post on Instagram.
Your dream adventure does not begin when your plane lands or when you start your car; your dream adventure begins the moment you decide on what it is.
As in any adventure, the more mishaps → the more magic.
One last thought.
“There are only four types of officers. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm … Second, there are the hard-working intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard-working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.”
— General Erich von Manstein on the German Officer Corps
Stop doing so much.
This post was inspired by Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burekman.