2 April 2022, I celebrated my 26th birthday at home with beloved parents and relatives. This was my second consecutive birthday at home ever since the pandemic as I started working remotely when the Malaysia government declared a lockdown around October 2020. In a blink of an eye, I have been home for one and a half year now, and I am super grateful that I got to spend quality time with my parents every single day. I could never imagine spending this much time at home ever since I left hometown for university and work at 18 years old. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, thoughts like how many times more can I still see my parents if I only visit during special occasions maybe twice a year always came across my mind, and the number is stupidly low. However, my subconscious mind will hit back with, “this is how it is, I have to study, I have to work, there is just not enough time for me to go back, and my parents would understand that”. Was that an excuse to make me feel better or this is just the norm for everybody else?

My perspective on time changes a lot for the past two years with all the events happening around the globe such as the pandemic, wars, natural disasters, accidents and etc. Condolences to those whose limited time on earth have been stolen from them. This made me realized that, life is short, every hours, minutes or seconds is a gift, I should never take it for granted. I don’t know how much time I have left in this lifetime, and I will never know, all I can do is, have my priorities set and make good use of the time to achieve whatever I wanted to.

Recently, I came across a Twitter thread on how short life is. It was a good read and it actually motivated me to write this blog. Going through the thread, I found three other articles on similar topic that I think it’s worthy of your few minutes. Both Your Life in Weeks and The Tail End are from Wait But Why. Another piece is from Paul Graham’s blog and he titled it Life is Short. Highly recommended if you are interested in this topic, even if you are not, give them a read and it might change your perspective on how you view “time”.

Accepting that life is short, no one knows what’s happening tomorrow, or maybe there’s no tomorrow. If there’s no tomorrow, will I still spend my time like how I am currently doing? Or, I would do it differently? Here’s my reflection on how I am spending my time currently and if I would want to change any of them. My reflection is broken down into three areas that I value the most in my life - my personal life, family and friends, and my career.

On personal life, my definition of personal life is the time that I spend outside of work or sleep. It accounts of a big part of my day, or to be exact, 1/3 of a weekday and 2/3 of a weekend. Unfortunately, it’s a shame to admit that, for the past few months, I am wasting a lot of those precious hours doing mostly nothing but just chilling, watching videos on YouTube, and maybe “thinking” about life. It’s fine to rest, but looking back, maybe I am procrastinating more than resting. It’s interesting how the mind works, part of my mind wanted to learn a new piece on the piano, finish the book that I am half way in, or finish the side projects that I have started long time ago. But at the same time, another part of my mind telling me those can wait, I should chill and rest after a long day or week at work. Most of the time, the mind telling me to rest won. For example, this blog post was supposed to be up on my 26th birthday on 2 April 2022, but I was just too good at finding excuses to delay it day by day. If you are reading this now, maybe I have made up my mind that I should spend my time a little more wisely. I have been experimenting on budgeting my time on a weekly basis like how you would budget money. Here’s a break down of my hours in a week:

hours_in_a_week = 168 hours (24h x 7d)
sleeping_hours  =  56 hours (8h x 7d)
working_hours   =  40 hours (8h x 5d)
eating_hours    =  21 hours (3h x 7d)
chilling_hours  =  11 hours (1h x 5d + 3h x 2d)

remaining_hours =  40 hours (4h x 5d + 10h x 2d)

Looking at the break down, I have a good amount of 40 hours to do things that I personally wanted to do. Here’s how I might budget the 40 precious hours.

side_projects = 13.0 hours (1h x 5d + 4h x 2d)
exercising    =  7.0 hours (1h x 7d)
reading       =  7.0 hours (1h x 7d)
family_time   =  7.0 hours (1h x 7d)
playing_piano =  4.5 hours (0.5h x 5d + 1h x 2d)
cooking       =  1.5 hours (1.5h x 1d)

The numbers might look idealistic but man it’s mathematically possible that I could make good use of the time I have in a week to do all these stuff. At this point, the number of hours per day is not a fixed rules, for example, I don’t necessarily have to read 1 hour a day, I might not feel like reading on Tuesday night and I could just cover it by reading 2 hours on Saturday morning. Also, my priorities might varies every week so it’s nice that I could budget accordingly base on the priorities of the week. I hope this experiment goes well, and my time can be spent more wisely from now onwards.

On family and friends, time spending with family and friends falls under my definition of personal life but they are important enough to be on its own for our topic today. At the beginning of this post I asked the question - “How many times more can I visit my parents if I only visit them twice a year during special occasions?” Let’s do the math now:

average_life_span     = 76
age_of_dad            = 61
age_of_mom            = 60

year_left_with_parent = 16

So using the average life span of 76 years old and assuming that I only visit them twice a year, the answer to the question is stupidly low of 32 times more. The number of times can be lower due to any reasons, for example two of my brothers are working in Singapore and they haven’t been home for two years due to Covid-19 and work. I am super grateful that for the past one and a half year, I was spending most of my time at home, having breakfast, lunch and dinner with both my parents, celebrating my birthday and theirs together knowing that I might not have that many times left doing the same thing with them. A note for myself, spend more time with them, take more photos or videos of these special moments even though I am not a photography person, but those memories captured will mean a lot when the time comes.

The same can be used for friends. Nowadays, I rarely see my friends that I used to spend my everyday with when I was younger. Now, it is like once a year? Or worst, once every two years. As time goes, it will only get harder and harder for us to meet due to any reasons. Friend A might relocate for work and friend B might have a family to look after. Here’s another note to myself, cherish those friends that take the initiative to ask you out, and make sure you make time for it! Don’t forget to capture those moments as well. What can be better? Be the friend that take the initiative and ask your best friends out. Remember that, it could be the last 10 times that you could spend time with your best friends, or less if you don’t take the initiative!

What about the family that I might start in the future? This’s a topic for later, but I would definitely want to spend a lot of time with them!

On career, career is a big part of everyone’s life, it kind of define who you are in this lifetime like how we talk about Nikola Tesla being the genius inventor or Ludwig van Beethoven being one of the most admired composer and pianist. I now have a stable job with a pretty decent pay working as a software engineer at a local startup. It was a golden opportunity for me two years ago as I transitioned from a mechanical engineer graduate to a self-taught developer. But if you ask me now, “Do I want to spend the next 2 years of my life doing what I am doing now?” The answer is no.

So what would I want to do instead? I have been planning and building a product on the side and I would love to make it my full-time job as a solopreneur. Of course there are a lot of uncertainties on going this route which I will talk about them later, but here’s why I think I would prefer building my own product at this point of my life. The first reason is that I get to build a product that I am excited about, which is something that I am not getting right now at work where I am building a product that the founders are excited about. There’s nothing wrong with this but if given a choice I would love to at least try building something that excites me. The second reason is the time and location flexibility that I get working for myself. Imagining the lifestyle of me visiting places while working, attending any ad-hoc events of my family and friends without having to worry about the holiday quota keeps me pumped.

Of course, the above are the ideal situations, being a solopreneur is never an easy job. There are so many things that could go wrong. What if the product I am building has no market? Do I even know how to run a business or do marketing? Can I even make a decent living out of this? Well, I will never know the answer if I never try doing it. Also, I don’t know if I still have the motivation or courage to try in the future when I have more commitments and responsibilities. How bad can it be right? The worst case is my product fails and I think I could handle that! It’s not going to be a do or die situation as well, I don’t have to leave my job to build the product, I just need to make good use of the time I have and just build it. If it goes off, great, if it fails, at least I don’t have any regrets of not trying.

I am ending this with a quote:

Time is free, but it’s priceless.
You can’t own it, but you can use it.
You can’t keep it, but you can spend it.
Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.

– Harvey Mackay –