Why I Stopped Living by the 24-Hour Rule (And You Should Too)

How I went from feeling trapped and without options to optimistic and resourceful.

I don’t know if I’m going through a midlife crisis. Perhaps I am. However, what I do know is that there are parts of my life that I enjoy, and there are others which make me feel like my life isn’t my own.

Over the past decade I’ve been working to address and change some of the parts I don’t like. And I’ve found that there have been 3 reframes I’ve made that have helped me find time to do more of what I like.

Reframe 1: Breaking out of the 24-hour construct

I first heard of Mitchell Feigenbaum in James Gleick’s book Chaos. This was a long time ago; I was in my early 20s. Most of the book went over my head, however, the one thing that stayed with me all these years later is Feigenbaum’s story of how he went about adding more hours to his day.

In Gleick’s book, Feigenbaum is the eccentric mathematical physicist who decided to adjust his days to be 26 hours long instead of the usual 24.

I love this story. It speaks to a certain rebelliousness, and there’s a genius in it. We all complain that 24 hours in a day is too little. Well, here is a person who actually did something about it. He went back to first principles and solved his problem.

This idea changed how I think about my day

It took me over a decade to get to the crux of what Feigenbaum’s time allocation could potentially mean for me.

What he did is redefine what a day was.

A day is an artificial construct. We allocated 24 hours to a day, based on the earth’s rotation around the sun.

Overwhelmingly this construct dictates what we do and when we do it. We plan our days as if they are immovable boundaries. We have work, personal time and sleep. And anything new that we might want to do has to somehow fit into this paradigm of ‘a day’.

Now, I haven’t gone to adjusting my days to be 26 hours long. But what I did do is think more broadly about how I allocate my time. We are told we need to exercise daily, write daily (if you want to be a writer), read daily… the list goes on. Everything we want to do outside of sleep and work, thanks to the 24-hour heuristic, seems to, for no discernible reason, fit somewhere into the constraints of a single 24-hour window.

We tend to forget that there isn’t a rule that we need to do the same thing daily.

If you zoom out, to say a week, all of a sudden you have far more time. Don’t go to the gym every day, why not just go 5 times a week and find the slots in your week where you can make it work for you?

If you want to write regularly, you could do it 4 times or 6 times or 10 times a week. If you want to do something 7 times in a week, you could do all 7 instances of that activity on a Monday.

What this reframe of time meant for me was that I can still do a thing regularly, despite not having the time to do it each day. It also woke me up to the fact that I can shuffle my schedule around at a scale that doesn’t make me feel like I don’t have enough time.

Which leads to the next reframe…

Reframe 2: Work is about output not about time allocation

Anyone who has a job probably signs a contract saying they will work for 8 hours a day, and that those hours will be between 9 - 5. If you’re a shift worker, the hours might be different.

Work for most of the past century has been something we were expected to dedicate a certain number of hours to - usually 40 hours per week. However, for most of us, we are measured on the quality of our outputs and not by the number of hours you were at work.

Your boss isn’t going to give you a pay increase or a promotion because you were present for 40 hours every week over the course of a year. She only cares about what you deliver.

So, if what matters is the quality of your work, why not look at how you approach the time you spend working? For many there are periods during our traditional working hours where we are either low in energy, or the work demands on us aren’t all that onerous. I’ve started looking at these hours and allocating them to do other productive activities that allow me to either improve myself or improve my lifestyle.

During my lunch hour, when I have one, I might dedicate some of that time to completing a course. Currently I’m upgrading my understanding on the intricacies of accounting. Previously I’d write or read.

There are time-crevices in our days (both at work and at home) which we lose to scrolling or other insignificant activities. And this is because we don’t believe we can do anything significant in fewer than 30 minutes.

Hemingway carried a book with him wherever he went. During his time as a war correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War, he famously reached for whatever book he had in his pocket and read during periods where there wasn’t much going on - putting those time-crevices to good use.

If you rethink how you believe you’re ‘allowed’ to spend your time in any particular context, you’ll uncover slivers of time that add up to become significant allocations of time that you’re probably missing out on. It is this time that will allow you to build your dream side-hustle, or to learn new skills, or to feed your curiosity.

Reframe 3: How we make money

For most of my adult life I believed a person could only make money by having a job or starting a business selling a product or service.

And then I heard the term ‘portfolio career’. The term refers to someone who makes money by monetising their skills in several different contexts. This allows them to make money from different sources. It also means they don’t have an over-reliance on a single income stream and that if one source of income falls through, they have a couple of other streams that can see you through.

As someone who has a job, the more I read about having a portfolio approach to my income, the more anxious I became. I’d obsess, constantly asking myself, ‘what would happen for me if I were made redundant in my current job? Should I quit my job and consult and start my own business and have 50 different clients to mitigate my risk?’

And I couldn’t work out where to start. I didn’t want to quit my job, but I did want to do other things and use the full spectrum of skills I’d acquired over the years.

And then I found the perfect starting point.

I examined my finances and broke down where all the money that had found its way into my life came from. It came as no surprise that I’d made most of my money from my job.

However, what did strike me as fascinating was how many different sources of income I had. There was interest on a savings account. There were small investments that had provided dividends and there was even a small gesture from a friend for whom I’d done some consulting work as a favour. All in all, there were 9 headings around my income pie chart.

And this gave me a great starting point for how I diversify my income sources. I’ve been able to decide where I want the slivers on the pie chart to grow wider and understand what other income streams I might want to add to the mix.

A few years ago, I felt constrained with very few options open to me, today I see opportunities everywhere. I feel I have time, ideas and am optimistic about the future. And all it took was reframing a few simple assumptions that I believed were immutable.