I have been obsessed with time since I was very young.

It used to be a problem for me as I would put myself under unnecessary pressure because of the counting that would go on inside of my head.

As I age gracefully, it is less of an obstruction. 

Time is healing my obsession with time.

But before the maturity that I now embrace, it was not always that good.

Some harsh edge of your seat mental health stuff would be going on inside my mind because I would put myself under pressure.

Everything I would do, I would time. Tick Tock. Constantly.

Obsessed.

Even my sleep. I got to the stage where I would wake up without an alarm clock and even force myself to wake at a given time. It was one of my personal superpowers. 

The ability to set a time in my mind to awake, and then I would awake at that moment. Boom. I was a ‘Sleep Superman’

There I would be, counting and measuring the minutes of sleep when I would awake, like a man possessed.

‘Think of a time and wake up, bang on! Or think, how much did I miss it by? F*ck.’

I was always, always under, waking early by minutes… that was never good enough. I wanted to get it spot-on.

Possessed.

However, I now know that my sleep quality was terrible. My ability to avoid an alarm clock was based upon my unconscious use of the circadian rhythm. No superpower employed. I was habitual in everything I would do, hence the tuning into my natural rhythm.

I would go to bed at the same time every night.

Walking to school routines, the same. Study time and the chores that I had to get done, habitual. Get coal from the coal bunker was measured. Doing the dishes, timed, measured… everything was compared; likewise,… all of it was getting timed approximately inside my head.

I would estimate the time needed to complete a task and then work to get things finished, to beat the clock.

Often my estimations were way off, and so the stress and inner agitation would begin.

When I started working in the real world, this was a benefit. I could get things done. I could also drive a team result, and boy, we were good. We were like clockwork, and everyone played their part. 

My head was seeing the mechanics of the operations and allotting the time to complete, and then off we would go. Achieving stuff.

As I got older and more mature, I carried more weight from other life challenges, and the ‘time thing’ became less of a problem.

Now my focus is on getting my time back. 

Getting back my time has become my passion, and I am successfully managing the actual time that it will take. 

It will be a slow burn. I have set out a timeline and a future closure date on the financial goal needed to support that take back. 

Still, I am comfortable with setbacks and dips that will challenge getting to the finishing line for the money side of things.

“Your Time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”

Steve Jobs

On the other hand, there is no finishing line for managing my time, and for the first period in my life, my embracing of time is a wonderful thing.

My whole financial freedom drive is about buying back my time so that I can, well, take it easy and do the things that I want to do and at my own pace. It will be my time.

I want to be time rich. This is my framing for life. I want to get rich slowly in life, and by rich, I mean time rich. 

Wealth is an enabler to many things. It can buy a multitude of obligations. But I am refined to the fact I will never be that type of cash-rich. 

Real wealth is not my goal. 

Time wealth is my goal.

Where previously, I would be obsessing about the time and then stressing myself out. I am now looking forward to the time freedom that I might have in the not so far away future.

I might still be managing time inside my head, and I will be possibly more obsessed with it in the future than I am now.

But at least it will be my own clock that I am running down, and I will be able to spend the time running it down with the people I love…

At their pace, and not at mine.

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