Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey there billionaire. Yep, I'm talking to you. If you expect to live another 31 years, you're already a billionaire. Not in money, but in the real
[00:00:10] Speaker B: measure of wealth, time.
[00:00:12] Speaker A: That's because 31 years is roughly a billion seconds. But most of us waste time in ways we'd never waste money. The currency of time billionaires is micro moments, the 90 second to 15 minute gaps hidden between the structured parts of your day. This podcast is about reclaiming them with quick research backed ideas to help you feel more creative, productive and alive. Welcome to Time Billionaires. Let's make your next micro moment count.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Today's episode is about three words that don't translate neatly into English. An Icelandic word, tima, which means something like hesitating to spend time or money on something even though you could technically afford it. A Japanese word, bokeh, which means staring into space and letting your mind wander. And a Spanish word, vasalando, which describes traveling when the journey matters more than the destination. These are three words for experiences that exist in our lives, but that English doesn't quite give us language for. And it turns out that the words we have in a language and the ones that we don't shape what we notice, what we value and what we think is possible.
Language shapes our reality. Every culture develop words for experiences that matter to them. Sometimes those words capture something so specific that other languages don't have an equivalent. In English, we essentially have one main word to describe all of time. But the ancient Greeks had two Chronos refers to measured sequential time, the time that you track on a clock or in calendar with deadlines and schedules. But the ancient Greeks also had another word, kairos, which describes qualitative time, how a moment feels to the people experiencing it, moments that feel expansive and meaningful. And so if Kronos measures how much time we have and kairos describes how time feels, then the Icelandic word tima captures something else entirely. It describes how we choose to allocate that time. Tima refers to hesitating to spend time or money on something, even though other people may think that you could afford it. We usually flatten that nuance in English into something like I don't have time for that. But most of the time what we're actually saying is slightly different. We're basically saying I'm choosing to spend my time somewhere else and this isn't a priority for me currently.
So noticing how that difference comes up in our lives is actually really important and leads us to our very first micro moment exercise today. The next time you catch yourself saying something like, I don't have time for that.
Ask a slightly different question. Do you actually not have time? Are you choosing to spend it somewhere else? Neither version is inherently wrong, but framing your priorities as a form of a choice and how you're choosing to allocate them as opposed to something you have to do or can't do, can make all the difference in how your time feels and how much agency you feel you have over it. My dad often says affordability is a matter of priorities, and he said that when I was a kid, when he chose not to buy things that my friend's parents had and found priorities, and I was sort of like, well, why wouldn't you buy that too? You can afford it. And he would say that he couldn't afford to buy this, that or the other and still put away enough money for college or do the things that he thought were important. So to him, that was a choice, and he very much framed it as such. And this visibility toward deciding what we're prioritizing is often the very first step toward feeling more intentional and fulfilled about the things that we have in our lives. Our former podcast guest Erica Keswin, who was on a great episode that I highly recommend, said, a lack of intentionality is a recipe for resentment. And when she first said that, I thought it sounded a little bit strong. But she's right. That's exactly what Tema captures. When we drift through our days without intentionality and without deciding where our time goes, we often end up resentful about where it went. We give away our micro moments towards things that don't make our lives better, that don't make us happier, like fragmented scrolling and endless notifications.
But it doesn't feel like a choice when you're kind of sucked into those dopamine hits when you're living in a stream of constant obligations.
The concept of teema reminds us that every minute we spend is a decision. It's a vote for what we think actually matters. And that applies to both years and micro moments when we don't realize there's an opportunity cost to where we're choosing to spend our time. It's easy to feel like we didn't actually do it intentionally, or we didn't decide what we could afford.
Research on time, agency and behavioral science backs that up. Studies consistently show that people who feel a stronger sense of control over their time report higher life satisfaction and lower stress. And agency over how we spend our time is a fundamental psychological need that even shows up in toddlers. Children engage more deeply in activities they've chosen, rather than ones that they feel have been imposed on them. And that sense of control isn't necessarily tied to having more free hours, but. But feeling like you can choose how you do spend that time. When people consciously choose how to spend even small pockets of time, those moments feel more meaningful. But when time is spent reactively, like responding to notifications or filling gaps with distractions, we often feel worse off, even if we technically have more free time. So the difference between feeling time poor and time rich often isn't the number of hours you have, but how those hours feel to where you've spent them.
So that brings us back to the three ideas we started.
Tima, boquetto, and vasilando. They reflect cultural ideals about time that many of us experience but may not name. And each suggests a different way to reclaim small moments during the day. Here's our second micro moment exercise around the concept of boquetto. Bocchetto means staring into space and letting your mind wander at some point. Today, take 60 seconds to simply gaze out the window into the distance or to the horizon. You can set a timer on your phone and then put it away. And you don't have to try to think about anything in particular. Just let your mind wander and see what you notice. In cultures that often treat stillness as wasted time, bocchetto reminds us that sometimes the brain needs open space, and moments like this often lead to creative insights, emotional processing, and mental resets. But even when they don't, they still restore something. They make us feel better. Our last micro moment exercise today is comes from the Spanish word vasalando. And I've been told that this is the vasalando as they'd use it in South America, not in Spain, apparently. In Spain, vasalando means sort of a mean form of sarcasm. But we're talking about South American Spanish. Vasalando there describes traveling when the journey itself matters more than reaching the destination, which is really life, if you think about it. Try applying this idea to one ordinary activity you do today, like walking somewhere, making tea, or cleaning the kitchen, or even just reading a few pages of a book. Do it slightly slower than you normally would. It doesn't have to be intentionally inefficient, just without rushing toward the next thing to see what feels natural when you experience it. I noticed that I was sort of rushing on walks with my daughter, and they didn't feel as relaxing and restorative as they should have because I was just in this default hustle movement culture. But when I just walked Even more slowly, 10% more slowly then came naturally to me. At first I noticed that I enjoyed it more and we actually walked for longer and farther because it felt better when you just enjoy the experience itself as the whole point. Life could feel more vasalando than it often does. And the mindset behind vasalando of caring about the experience more than the outcome has another interesting side effect.
Sometimes caring slightly less about the result actually helps us perform better. And I've experienced this myself in everything from giving a presentation that I felt was high stakes or not, or just playing Pac man for the first time. The very first time I played Pac man was with a coworker who considered himself really good at it. And he came in pretty focused on how to do fancy trick moves and I didn't. I just sort of went here and went there and I ended up winning all seven games that we played because I really just didn't care about the outcome and wasn't trying to maximize every move I made made. I was just sort of going with the flow and seeing what came to me. There have been other moments in my life when I tried something that felt challenging and because I wasn't overly attached to the outcome, I was able to relax and focus on the activity itself. I didn't tie my identity to being good at Pac man, for example. And ironically, this can lead to better results in all kinds of things. When we're intensely focused on outcomes, we tend to overthink and tighten up and become self critical in a way that's actually distracting from our goals. But when we approach things with a little more vasalando energy, caring about just enjoying the experience and connecting with other people, we often perform more naturally and enjoy ourselves more along the way, which is of course the whole point. This sort of came up recently of this idea. I spoke at a tech company's ERG the other week and was asked the question how do you decide what's a priority when everything's a priority? And the answer I gave was something along these lines. The idea that we could have multiple priorities, that the word priority itself could be pluralized, is a relatively modern phenomenon and is actually at odds with the root of the word. The root prior means first. What 12 things should I do first? Is essentially what we're asking when we say how do you decide what's a priority when everything's a priority? So I like this trick, asking myself for things that feel like they're on this never ending priority list. If I don't do this, what will happen. And then actually answering that somebody else will do it. It won't get done. My kitchen will stay dirty. This email won't get sent. And then as a follow up question, can I live with that outcome? If the answer is yes, it becomes a lot easier to whittle it down. So you can try this today. Just write down something that you've recently told yourself you don't have time for. In other words, something that you've said you couldn't afford in tema terms.
Then ask yourself, is it actually impossible to do this right now? Or is something more important? Is it something I've decided not to prioritize? If the answer is the second, ask a follow up question. Is that a decision I feel good about? Sometimes the answer will be yes, but occasionally you'll discover something that you actually want to do to make space for. And recognizing that is the first step toward reclaiming those moments. The Icelandic word tima, the Japanese word boqueto, and the Spanish word vasalando all capture experiences that exist in our lives, whether we have words for them or not. But when we start naming those experiences, we begin noticing opportunities to have them more intentionally and more often. Because words both shape the questions that we ask and what we consider productive. They shape how fast we think life should move. And when we begin noticing ideas like intentional time, wandering time, and journey time, we start reclaiming moments that might otherwise slip past us.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: Moments that could move us a little
[00:11:05] Speaker B: bit closer to the time billionaires that we are. Thanks for listening.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: Thanks for spending this micro moment with me.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: If you found it valuable, share it
[00:11:17] Speaker A: with a fellow time billionaire and give us a rating to help others discover the power of micro moments. For more ways to reclaim your time, check out timebillionaires.org and follow me. Rebecca Shattucks on LinkedIn. See you next time.
