Behavior #4: Set aside ample time for building and maintaining Health
The duration of your time on earth is limited, and you will certainly die — but you may push the instantaneous likelihood of your death ever into the future.
This is done by maximizing your Health, building your physical and mental reserves as a deposit on an expanding, productive lifetime. Through this practice, you will add duration to your Agency, trading your Time in the here and now for the opportunity to Impact the world far into old age, your influence continuing to build long after your contemporaries have left the mortal coil.
Like all things of value, this manipulation of the future dictates sacrifice — you must set aside time for exercise, diet, and social connection today, and you must wrest your daily schedule to produce stress levels that are exceedingly low, precisely level, and infinitely tolerable.
This means there are things you will not do, items you will not accomplish, and other goals you must set aside, often from the very domains we’re seeking to optimize. You may choose to make less absolute income in order to exercise, to expand your project timelines to allow friendships to thrive, and even to say “no” when enthusiasm would dictate otherwise. Nonetheless, you will do so in comfort, cocooned by the knowledge that your chronological time is expanding (regardless of current appearances).
This Behavior must be elevated in your mental pantheon above many (if not most) of the others we’ve discussed — there is no more powerful tool for optimizing your Agency than to give it additional years of action.
Set aside ample time for building and maintaining your Health.
READ ALL THE BEHAVIORS OF THE TIME AWARE
