Time Well Spent

From David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of 37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails:

I feel like Stoicism has given me a good head start on contemplating mortality, though. I’ve had Memento Mori (latin for “remember death”) on my phone background many times over the years. So it’s less about mortality per se, and more, like Clayton Christensen would ask, How Will You Measure Your Life?

That’s the kind of legacy I care about. Being able to say “life was long enough” to myself on the last day, and mean it. To believe that I spent my time well, in service of pursuits worth the effort, in concert with people worth the relation, in honor of virtues worth upholding.

My reflection is that to be able to say at the end of our journey that our life was time well spent, we should be able to say at the end of each day that today our time was well spent. We shouldn’t wait for something out of the ordinary to happen to start spending our days and hours in a meaningful way. Let’s start today.