Happy Birthday, son

Don’t let the time slip away

Today’s is the 100th OTAAT newsletter. I’m aware that noone ever cares about these milestones except the creator! But for those that are thinking of starting a newsletter I’ll just say that amongst all those newsletters there’s been a lot of thinking that I’ve forced myself to think. That’s been valuable, to me at least, and a happy, intentional use of the time I have.

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Today is my son’s 12th birthday. There’s so much to reflect on. He’s such a nice, funny, insightful quite-large-already human. I really like him. And I happen to not be with him right now (he’s in London, I’m in Spain) so this all feels more heart-achey.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of photos on my phone of him through the twelve years. And many memories of all varieties that come to mind, especially today.

Another thing that comes to mind is that haunting statistic (which did the rounds in 2023) that by the time your child is 12 you’ve already spent 75% of the time you’ll ever spend with them.

So I try to think about the future instead. I want to make sure that I spend more time with him over the coming weeks, months and years, and the only way to be sure is to have a system. And I come back to timeboxing and the simplicity of a recurring timebox to ensure repeated, dedicated, quality time with this person I love.

There’s a version of this for you and your life. Who is the person - son, daughter, parent, niece, uncle, friend, neighbour—whom you’d really like to spend more time with? Most of us have several close friends whom we’ll see just a few more times. Don’t wait to make a New Year’s Resolution. Exercise your agency and…

…do something about it right now. Put into your calendar a monthly (say) recurring appointment to spend time with X. And don’t stop there, think about how to enjoy that time the most. What present might you take? What will you do together? Think about what you want to say and what you might enjoy discussing. Do you need to buy tickets to a show in advance?

There’s a chapter about this in Timeboxing called For intention. It opens with an epigraph from Cat’s in the Cradle (watch this video, read some of the heart-wrenching comments) and it urges us to live a life of lived-out intentions, thereby not living a life of regret. We have the opportunity to switch this now. We won’t have that opportunity forever.

The song has served as a reminder to me to, frankly, timebox. To be clear about| what’s important and to systematically do more of that. Luka knows the song and it means something to us now.

Writing this has helped me. I hope reading it has helped you.

Marc

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Links

Timeboxing, the book (US)
Timeboxing, the book (UK)
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