“Dawn of your final day” That’s not supposed to be there, we don’t want to know that… or do we? That was a countdown, aka a reverse-progress bar. Seems a bit grim to count down your remaining lifespan, but I say it should be liberating. Let me try to convince you.

I love time and our representations of time: timers and clocks. It’s a human construct, time. Humans have kept time since 3500 BCE, when the Egyptians set up obelisks that cast shadows, which eventually evolved into sundials. These shadows helped us capture the passage of the time. The Greeks refined them. The Romans put one in every public square. Long before we had anything that tick-tocked, we had sticks and shadows. The digital era brought us progress bars to help feel less uneasy with the amount of waiting computers expect from us. For example, downloads, file transfers, or installations.

Progress bars alter our perception of time passing - in “The importance of percent-done progress indicators for computer-human interfaces”, Brad Myers had people run database searches and had a set of people waiting with a progress bar and another without. He concluded that the progress bar or “percent done progress indicators” reduced anxiety amongst computer novices. Thanks, Brad. He was studying computer novices in 1985, but I think the finding generalizes.

I think progress bars can do more than reduce download anxiety. I think they can change how we live.

One of my favorite articles is Tim Urban’s “Your Life in Weeks,” where he visually represents a 90-year lifespan into tables, first in decades, months, and then weeks. It puts your life into a finite chart, that’s it. He compares a week to a precious 2mm 0.5-carat diamond, and if you collected every 4,680 weeks’ diamond in 90 years, you’d only get a tablespoon of them. Tim says you can do 2 things with this week’s diamond: yes, this one right now, you can 1. enjoy it, or 2. Build something to make your future diamonds or the diamonds of others more enjoyable. You can do both, and that’s awesome, and if you do neither, you just wasted them.

Now, if you’re like me, you might be a bit morbidly curious about what your remaining time looks like. I made a free app to visualize this easily, deathclock.me (I know, real descriptive, Gil!) I’ll have a link in the description. From the top, to the red square are the number of weeks already spent - the rest are the remainder. My precious diamonds, some wasted, some not.

Okay, that was heavy huh? You’re thinking, how the heck is this supposed to be liberating?

Here’s the thing about progress bars: they only feel good because they end. The bar reaches the end and bam! Most disappear after that and you forget what color the bar was. This real day-to-day life grid doesn’t work like that, you don’t catch up, the inbox refills the next day, the cats need food, the neighbor needs to hear your bad music in the morning. The todo bar regenerates.

A lot of the productivity books I’ve read definitely promote efficiency on handling emails, tasks, cat-dad chores, by time blocking, task-batching, and they do end up working well for me, but it’s easy to slip into the “efficiency trap” that Oliver Burkeman points out in his book, “Four thousand weeks - Time Management for Mortals”. He argues that being good at answering emails, only means you’ll get more emails and will never win the battle for inbox zero. I experience this myself when I was a software engineering manager, I became good at unblocking people at meetings, quick decisions, next steps that my reward became more meetings. My calendar filled up and I spent more time trying to unblock myself from having to take a meeting that could be emails/slack messages. Now, that was my first year and I’ve gotten better at noticing this trap and steering clear.

How do you get out of the trap? First notice, you’re in the trap! Are you not allowing yourself to do something important because you’re habit stacking and this habit has to happen before this other one can be considered? Or your calendar is full, but your week feels wasted and you notice that one break you took to play with cat was the first time you smiled all day? Don’t ask how I know. Or worst of all, you feel guilty resting because there’s something on the to list and you gotta do it, because that’ll actually earn the break! yuck. The trap is so good because the tasks are legitimate, the trash needs taking out, meetings have agendas (most of the time), you need to reply to that one message from a friend or coworker or connection. You don’t notice you’re trapped because you’re kinda being responsible.

Let’s deal with this efficiency trap. Burkeman’s answer is uncomfortable… too real, and aggravatingly simple: you accept that you will not get to most of it. It’s just a fact, you will never have nothing to do, that film, book, video game backlog will never be complete. Your time grid will run out before then. The only real question is which diamond you spend on what.

I started meditating years ago. Now, I’ve not been consistent, and I won’t try to convince you. I can’t just tell you that you spend most of your day in the future or the past, you have to notice it yourself. So the answer isn’t simply meditate, duh, but try to be present.

One way is to try to imagine every current experience as it were your last. This YouTube video — your last. That hug with a friend, the last hug you shared. The loud music in the boba cafe, the last piece of music. Then every moment can feel like diamonds, and you don’t have to think about next week’s and what you’ll do, because this current diamond, the one you’re living now is the only one you’ll experience. Yes, plan for your future, remember #2 “Build something to make your future diamonds or the diamonds of others more enjoyable”, but don’t be constrained by it.

Which brings me back to the screenshot. “Dawn of your final day” felt grim because we read it as a threat. But it’s just another progress bar, a stick casting a shadow. The countdown isn’t the problem. Pretending there isn’t one won’t protect you from the sands of time anyway. So enjoy this diamond. It’s the only one you’ve got right now.