Why You Should Schedule Your Death
By Karolis Strautniekas
All work and no play makes you an average worker.Research reveals that the vast majority of us will spend our lives with a singular focus: work. How much work? Almost 3,000 weeks (73 percent of our lives).
In a calendar full of recurring events (which don’t presume end dates), its nearly impossible to prioritize free time and “me time” unless we actually schedule it in our calendars.
In an interview with Fast Company, Brooke Siem, the co-owner of New York’s Prohibition Bakery, shares how she has taken a rather extreme measure to motivating work-life balance. She has appointment scheduled for the very distant future: “November 6th, 2069. DEAD.”
For years, people had told her to just enjoy the moment. “It never made sense to me, until I put that in the calendar.” Then, she thought, “Okay, I get it.”
To force herself to prioritize herself in addition to her work, Siem scheduled a grim reminder of her own mortality.
It’s a little twisted, I guess…But just kind of writing that down, having it kind of exist the same way you have any other appointment in life—it reminds you, even subconsciously, that that day is coming. Just having that in the back of my mind makes me think, ‘This is not that big a deal, in the grand scheme of things.
We know that work fills the time allocated for its completion. But by reminding ourselves of the limited amount of time we have, it may just be the motivator we need to not fill our every waking moment with more work.
