How running a business changed my perspective on time

From living for the weekends to…

From an early age I had it drilled into me that work is something negative, something that simply has to be endured. That it is necessary in order to live, and that life is something that only exists outside of work. This was the perspective I absorbed from observing how my own parents and the people around them viewed work.

My parents worked for low wages and were often forced to take whatever opportunities came their way. My mother spent many years working as a cleaner, wearing herself down in the process. And my father has worked at the same factory for the last 25 years, for the same salary and the same conditions. I watched how they had to fight to make ends meet, and how vacations became something that had to be planned and budgeted for a whole year in advance.

I think this has always stayed in the back of my mind, and it made me automatically develop a view of things that said life was unfair, and that no matter what you did you would end up having to fight for even the simplest things. So why even try. If you have read my earlier posts, you will know that my time in school reflected that attitude in many ways, which has not really benefited me in any way.

But that way of thinking also automatically made me start living for the weekends. The weekdays became the sad and slightly depressing days, because I knew that now it was five days of work before I could be set free again and start living. When you have that attitude, life quickly starts to look negative, because the balance between work and what you actually want to do becomes skewed. This followed me through quite a few years, both when I worked as a blacksmith and when I worked in telesales in the Philippines. But it was also in the Philippines that things began to change for me.

The first steps

The first real steps I took were during my time in the Philippines, where I met my wife who I have now been with for 11 years. She showed me something I had never seen before. In Denmark, many of us have a view of school as something that just has to be endured, and if you can skip class you are seen as cool. But in the Philippines it was completely different. It was not the class clown who was popular, it was the smartest student. The students fought for the chance to help out in school, and they took pride in learning and building their future.

I also saw how life turned out for those who did not take education seriously, compared to those who fought for it. And slowly I began to realise that life was perhaps not as predetermined as I had previously thought. That you yourself are in control of how your future looks, and that just because your parents have lived a hard life, you do not have to do the same. The only one standing in the way of you and the future you want is yourself.

Live what you preach

This new perspective on life came as a great revelation to me. I realised that I had wasted my first 20 years being angry at school and at society, because I had inherited a vision that life was already planned out and that you were stuck in the pattern that had been laid out for you. But nothing is written in stone, and you can shape your own future if you are willing to fight for it.

With this newfound understanding I changed my attitude and began working hard to shape the life I wanted to live. I decided that only I would dictate how my days looked, no one else and certainly not society. So I began to read. I took courses on Udemy and Coursera and studied everything I could. I learned an incredible amount, and as I gained more and more knowledge the opportunities grew larger and larger for me. My entire view of life changed, and suddenly I saw that investing in yourself is something positive.

When work became a part of me

Around four to five years passed from when we moved from the Philippines until I started my own company. In those years I worked my way into the tech industry, learned my craft, and discovered for the first time how it feels when work is not something you long to escape from. But it was only when I started Sustainable WWW that my relationship with time changed completely.

As I began working more and more with something I truly cared about, the boundary between work and personal life began to collide in a way I had never experienced before. When you combine that with fighting for your own dream every day, the lines between your own time and your work time become completely blurred. Suddenly I had no urge to stop working at four in the afternoon, because it felt like my hobby, and I was fighting for my own vision instead of giving eight hours of my 24 hours to someone else’s dream.

Today my days look completely different than they did ten years ago. I wake up around half past five in the morning and usually spend the first hour writing my articles before the workday begins. When I come home around half past four I spend time on things at home and with my children, and when they have gone to bed I use the time to work on my own dreams until it is time to sleep. I no longer spend time scrolling social media, I do not watch series on Netflix, and I do not feel like I am missing anything. My time goes to what I care about, and it does not feel like a sacrifice.

Even as I sit here writing this I can feel how my passion for what I do rises up again. Over time, work has become a part of me and not just something that is expected of me.

This is something that family and friends have often commented on, because they think I work a lot. But I think it is because they have not stood where I stand. Many still go to work for someone else and have not yet felt that spark inside that comes when you start fighting for your own dreams. I do not glorify long working hours, because I actually think society has a tendency to worship busyness in an unhealthy way. But there is a difference between working a lot because it is expected of you, and working a lot because what you do has become a part of who you are.

My time has become something valuable

Something else that changed when I started my company was the way I look at my time. I began to think about what I was spending my hours on, and whether they were well spent. Before, I could easily come home from work and sit down with my phone, and the next time I looked up two hours had passed because I had been caught up in short videos. But I started asking myself whether that was the right way to spend my time, and for me the answer was no.

Anyone can get money and anyone can buy things. But there is one thing that no one can buy, and that is time. We all have 24 hours in a day regardless of how much or how little money we have, and what we choose to do with them determines how much of life feels like our own. That realisation made me start seeing my time as something valuable, something I would not just give away to anything.

I remember reading a quote by Marcus Aurelius:

“What are you afraid of losing, when nothing in the world belongs to you.”

That sentence made me think about how possessions have no lasting value in the end. The only thing I can spend money on that I will never regret is experiences and time with those I love. It has meant that today, every time I have to make a decision, I ask myself whether it would be worth more to me to pay someone else to do it, so I can spend my time on something I would rather do or am better at.