The Myth of Owning Your Time
You’ve probably heard it all before. Be your own boss. Control your schedule. Own your time.
As attractive as it sounds, it’s a lie. Many people believe that working for yourself means unlimited flexibility. You can work where you want, when you want, and with whom you want for the rest of your life. What’s not to like?
Unfortunately, things are rarely so simple. Going out on your own seldom creates the time freedom that you expect. Why? Because, as a business owner, you will still have huge demands on your schedule. Those demands will just come from customers and vendors, instead of a boss.
Don’t get me wrong, calling the shots is far better than having no autonomy in a job you hate. But “owning your time” isn’t always the fantasy it’s made out to be either. All of your problems in life don’t magically go away when you run the show—they just change.
While you may not have a boss expecting you at a meeting at a particular hour, you’ll have other things that are just as urgent. You’ll get client requests at an inopportune time. You’ll have to fit part of your schedule to someone else’s. You’ll have employees quit on you (sometimes en masse). And when they do, guess who has to find their replacement? Hint: It’s you.
In my experience, the more successful someone is, the busier they tend to be. While they have control over their calendar in theory, it rarely turns out that way in practice. When you rise that high, everyone wants a piece of you, and it can become incredibly difficult to say “No.”
Unless you are actually retired (i.e., you don’t work anymore), your time freedom will be more limited than you think. After all, do you think Kim Kardashian has a lot of time freedom? What about Mark Zuckerberg? How about Jamie Dimon? I doubt it.
They have to answer to sponsors, regulators, or shareholders when called upon. While they have some control over their time, the demand for it is also enormous.
It wasn’t always this way, though. Historically, those with the highest incomes worked fewer hours than those with the lowest. But this has changed in recent decades. As researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found:
In 1983, the most poorly paid 20 percent of workers were more likely to put in long work hours than the top paid 20 percent. By 2002, the best-paid 20 percent were twice as likely to work long hours as the bottom 20 percent.
The “leisure class” of the past has been replaced by an industrious one. Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, reaffirmed this trend in 2019:
The rich today work harder than they used to and they increasingly work harder than the rest, including the middle class … The bottom 60 percent of the United States today work about 10 or 11 hours less per week on average … and the top 1 percent today works 4 or 5 hours a week harder than it did at midcentury.
And who works harder than the top 1 percent? The top 0.1 percent. A 2018 study in Harvard Business Review (full text here) tracked the time of 27 CEOs for an entire quarter and discovered that they:
- Worked, on average, 62.5 hours per week.
- Worked on 79% of weekend days.
- Worked on 70% of vacation days.
These weren’t CEOs of startups either. They headed large companies (average revenue of $13 billion), yet put in more hours than the vast majority of workers.
You might argue that these successful people have time freedom, but they choose not to use it. Well, having time freedom and never using it is the same as not having it at all.
Time isn’t like money. With money, if you don’t use it before you die, you can at least gift it to someone else. But that’s not true with time. There’s no way to transfer your unused hours. When it’s gone, it’s gone.
You can sit here and talk about “optionality” all you want, but the truth is that lots of people who have the option for time freedom don’t end up using it. So did it ever really exist?
I’m not trying to convince you that having a job is the same as being an entrepreneur. It’s not. Renting your time is clearly not as nice as owning it. However, I also think that many of those entrepreneurs claiming to own their time exaggerate what it’s really like.
Yes, if you work really hard early on, build a successful business, and then sell it, you’ll have the option to own your time. But this option only appears after the work has been done, not before.
So, instead of seeking to “own your time,” the better approach is to figure out what you really want to spend your time on, and then give it up for those pursuits.
Everything valuable in life requires some form of sacrifice. Whether it’s your career, your family, your health, or something else, you have to give up your time to get there. There’s no shortcut here.
So, instead of idealizing a perfect world where you control every minute of your day, build a life that you’re willing to give up control for.
I know what this feels like. As my life and career have progressed, I find myself with less time freedom each year. But this isn’t a problem. Because I’ve chosen this life and all the responsibilities that come with it. Responsibilities to my family, my friends, my readers, my coworkers, my community, and myself.
Owning your time is a myth. But choosing how you don’t own it isn’t.
Thank you for reading.
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This is post 516. Any code I have related to this post can be found here with the same numbering:
