The Time Pie Analogy

Do you see your time as your most valuable asset? It’s the one thing that you can’t buy more of, that you can’t get back, and that is limited in our lifetimes. But when it comes to where we spend our time I’ve found that many people are missing something critical about it.

If you want to improve your health, there’s a cost to it. Increasing exercise and allocating more time to shop for and prepare healthy meals takes up hours of the day, leaving less time for things like work and being social. Or at least that’s what you’d logically think…

That’s why I want to present to you the Time Pie Analogy.

Imagine that your day is shaped like a pie, and the time you spend doing different things make up different slices of the pie. Per the previous example, investing more time in health-related activities would take up a larger slice of pie, leaving less available for other things like work or time with people.

This suggests that you need to accept a tradeoff and understand that adding to one thing means you need to take from another. And while it's true that you have less literal minutes in a single day, that's not the full truth.

What happens when you invest in healthy, self-caring, soul-lifting experiences, is you create a bigger pie. The introduces a very important nuance to time which is quality. The value of the time you spend is a combination of quantity and quality.

What this means is that while investing more time in exercising or healthy meal-prepping does take up a larger percentage of the pie, the full pie grows bigger because of those activities. What that means is it gives you the energy, focus, presence, and momentum you need to improve the quality of everything else you do.

While the percentage slice of your work might be smaller, the amount of pie you get overall is larger because it’s a slightly smaller slice of a much larger pie!

When people talk about creating balance or harmony in life, this is what they mean. This is why taking one hour out of your work day to exercise allows you to actually get more done overall. This is how you can live a big life and do it all without making compromises. Spending more time on your health activities isn’t a tradeoff but rather a catalyst for everything else.

It’s a matter of doing the things that help you add more quality to the things you do, and have a life with a bigger pie where every slice has more to it!