For years, I told myself I didn't have enough time. I did. I was just spending it badly.

Are you using your time to be busy, or to be effective and live the good life? I used to think I was effective. It took me a while to notice how much of that was actually just busyness and motion.

Seneca: don't confuse activity with results

Seneca wrote it plainly, two thousand years before calendars had colors in them:

He had a word for the people he was writing to — occupati. Thoroughly engrossed, endlessly preoccupied, consumed by things that don't actually matter. Not idle — the opposite of idle, in fact, and that's precisely the trap. Busyness looks like the answer to a wasted life, when it's often just a more respectable version of the same waste.

Don't confuse activity with results. Being in a lot of meetings has never meant being productive — and we guard money and property with far more discipline than we ever apply to time, the one resource we can't actually get back.

One of the best training courses I've done — a Franklin Covey course, though I can't remember its exact name anymore — was built entirely around that distinction: open your calendar first each morning, not your inbox. The calendar shows what you've actually decided matters. The inbox shows what everyone else has decided matters for you.

Marcus Aurelius: one question, asked constantly

Where Seneca diagnoses the problem, Marcus Aurelius — writing his private journal amid military campaigns, never intending it for anyone but himself — gives the operational fix. One question, asked constantly:

Most of what we say and do, he argues, isn't. Cut it, and — in his own words — it brings a double satisfaction: to do less, and to do it better. Less noise, more room for the part that actually matters.

I've actually run this experiment on my own calendar. I went through every recurring cadence call — my own team's, and others I'd been pulled into — and asked Marcus Aurelius's question about each one. The weekly run-the-business calls survived; they're doing real work. Several others didn't, and I cut them. The monthly team all-up — the one that zooms out, covers status and progress, and brings in outside guests — also stayed, because it does something the weekly calls can't: it forces a wider view instead of another week of tunnel vision on the immediate.

Not every recurring meeting fails the test. That's the point. The question isn't "cut everything." It's "actually ask, instead of assuming."

And the test works on meetings you don't own too, not just your own. If an invite has no defined purpose, no agenda, nothing you're actually there to contribute — you can vote with your feet. Decline it. Nobody's obligated to sit in a room that was never built to need them.

What this looks like on an actual Tuesday

Meetings are expensive in a way most organisations never actually price: multiply the time by every participant in the room, and a weekly hour with ten people is a working day of collective time, every single week, indefinitely. Very few recurring meetings would survive being questioned that plainly.

Use the time that discipline frees up to actually drive outcomes — whether it's your own business or the corporation paying your salary.

Life is long enough. The only real question is how much of yours you've already given away to things that were never necessary.

Pick one recurring thing on your calendar this week and ask Marcus Aurelius's question about it. See what happens.

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/Jonas

Everything here is built from my own ideas, drawn from my reading, and life experience. For structure, validating research, proofreading, and edits, I use AI tooling to help make it a better experience for you, the reader.

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