Is Time On Your Side?

A Wake-Up Call for the Chronically Busy

We talk about time as if we own it.

We spend it, save it, waste it, manage it, but rarely do we feel it.

Not until we’re forced to stop.

I used to host a luxury lifestyle programme on CNN called Art of Life. I interviewed CEOs, celebrities, royalty — people with access to every imaginable luxury. And when I asked them what luxury truly meant for them, they always said the same thing: Time.

Time to be with their families and friends.

Time to be creative.

Time to just breathe.

It struck me then, and it continues to strike me now, especially in my work as a coach, that the thing we all crave most is the thing we most often trade away without thinking twice; without ever questioning 'why?'. We tell ourselves we’ll rest after the next deadline. We’ll eat better next week. We’ll reconnect with ourselves once we’ve handled the urgent things. We will give ourselves that time when the money comes in and our bills are paid.

We often chase certainty--especially financial certainty--by working harder and longer, believing that if we just push through, we’ll earn the right to rest and essentially, the right to feel safe. But it rarely works that way. The truth is, life is full of uncertainty, and no amount of overwork can erase that. What we really need isn’t more hours, it’s the capacity to navigate uncertainty with strength and resilience. And that only comes when we take the time to invest in our health, our minds, and the relationships that ground us.

I learned that the hard way.

I ignored the signals from my body for years, working extremely unhealthy hours, not investing in friendships, pushing through illness, feeling guilty for calling in sick. I worried about letting my team down. I worried about making life difficult for colleagues. About not being a "good girl" or a "team player". About being seen as dispensable. This isn't something new, especially for immigrants where we were taught that time is for work and rest is earned after that work is done. And self-care? I can hear my Mom's voice in my head asking, "What is that?"

But then I landed in hospital, more than once.

I had a tumour removed that had wrapped itself around the nerve controlling the muscles in my face. Later, I needed surgery to remove kidney stones. I had a severe panic attack where I ended up in an ambulance being rushed to hospital out of concern that I was having a heart attack. It's as if my body was telling me, screaming at me, to stop even going as far as to threaten me with facial paralysis and excruciating pain. This was me in my mid to late 30s. Each time I lay in those hospital beds, I would realise something deeply sobering: the world kept moving. The newsroom didn’t fall apart. The earth kept spinning. Time kept ticking away. Life carried on.

All those years I had pushed myself to keep going, thinking I didn't have a choice, and yet in stillness, I saw the truth: the only one paying the real price was me. No senior executives even noticed I was gone. The only "Get Well Soon" messages I received were from my immediate team of producers and writers. In fact, when I had had enough of those overnight hours and refused to work that shift, my dedication to my career was questioned by those senior executives. It proved to me that the time--the many years-- I spent "paying my dues" would never end and no one would prioritise my health but me. So what exactly was I doing? It would take a few more years and a few more knocks for me to be able to actually answer that question

So why is time a luxury?

Because we've made it so.

There’s a saying: “A healthy person has a thousand wishes. A sick person has only one.” I’ve lived that. I’ve also lived the reality that even in sickness, many of us can’t afford to stop. Because we’ve built systems that don’t reward rest. We’ve built systems and lifestyles that reward productivity over presence. That see taking care of ourselves as a luxury, not a necessity. That leave health and recovery to individuals to carve out time themselves while rewarding their exhaustion knowing full well there is no time to spare. Take Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, proudly touting those 90-hour weeks as a badge of honour. When would there ever be time to recover and rest? What’s wrong with this world when we take that insanity as gospel? What's wrong with us that we would place deals over human decency?

But it isn't just the system, we also bear responsibility for keeping up the charade of what "success" should look like.

We wear busy-ness like a kevlar vest to protect us from the brutalities of perception and judgement.

We delay joy. We skip the walk, the nap, the call to a friend, not because we don’t care, but because we’ve been taught those things are optional. They’re not. We tell ourselves we will take a vacation to ease the pressure off our every day life--we vacate our lives--to give us that time. But most of that time it's just geography.

Yes, life has become expensive — cripplingly so. But we’re paying for it in more ways than just dollars and cents, pounds and pennies. We're paying with our health, our happiness, our relationships, and, perhaps most of all, our time — something we can never get back.

We often feel like we should be grateful for the job and the paycheque, and yes, they help cover the basics of life. But it never seems enough because we keep moving the goal posts for what "enough" looks like. In return, what we sometimes overlook is that we’re also trading one of our most valuable resources: our time. It’s not that we don’t need to work, or that earning isn’t necessary — it’s just that the balance is off.

Oliver Burkeman, in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals writes about how when inventions such as the microwave, vacuum cleaner, and the computer came into modern existence life was meant to be made easier; we were meant to be given more time to enjoy our life. But the opposite happened. With time freed from having to do hours of chores, the expectation was, and continues to be, that that time can be used to be even more productive, not more relaxed. Today, as we get comfortable in this new age of AI, that question comes up again--over whether technology will aid us or drown us in productivity: So I decided to pose that question to ChatGPT and this is what it said:

We’re obsessed with productivity and control. We chase the idea that if we just become efficient enough—if we master our inboxes, fine-tune our to-do lists, and find the right time-saving tools—we’ll finally arrive at that elusive state of being “caught up.”

AI seems to promise exactly that: faster responses, automated tasks, streamlined workflows. On the surface, it looks like the answer. A way to finally get it all done.

But here’s the rub: the faster we can work, the more we’re expected to do. AI doesn’t necessarily lighten the load—it can raise the bar. Instead of freeing us from the grip of productivity culture, it risks tightening it. We’ll expect more from ourselves (and be expected by others) with less time, less rest, and less space to be human. The inbox doesn’t empty—it just fills with higher expectations.

And yet, there’s potential. If AI can take over the mundane, repetitive, or draining tasks, it could create space—for reflection, connection, rest. Things that don’t scale, but matter most. But that requires more than better tools. It calls for a shift in mindset: to recognise our limits, resist the urge to fill every spare moment, and use the time we free not to do more, but to live better.

So, in short: AI intensifies the dilemma. Whether it supports or undermines the core definition of a good life depends entirely on how we choose to relate to time, and whether we’re willing to stop equating productivity with worth.

Time is the most democratic resource we have; we all get the same 24 hours. But how we use it, how we respect it, is where the difference lies. And maybe the real luxury isn’t just having time. Maybe it's knowing how to honour it.

We are so drained by the lives we lead that we scroll before bed not realising three hours have passed by. We tell ourselves we’re unwinding, but more often than not, we’re avoiding.

At its core, the avoidance is a coping mechanism. It’s not laziness. It’s not indifference. It’s often a response to overwhelm, dissatisfaction, or disconnection, and sometimes, even grief for the life we thought we’d be living.

We spend our days overstimulated but undernourished. We respond to everyone else’s needs, meet deadlines, tick boxes but we rarely meet ourselves. By the time we crawl into bed, the thought of silence or stillness can feel confronting.

What if we notice how disconnected we feel from our partner?

What if we realise how tired we are not just physically, but of the rhythm we’ve been living by?

So we reach for our phones. We scroll, not because we’re lazy, but because it’s easier than feeling what’s beneath the surface. We seek connection, but settle for its illusion. We escape into other people’s lives, because something in us doesn’t feel at home in our own.

And it’s so easy to do because it’s designed that way. Scrolling asks nothing of us. No effort, no emotion, no decision. Just the flick of a thumb. Each post offers a tiny, unpredictable hit of dopamine; a digital slot machine that keeps us chasing the next thing. It gives us a sense of control, even if it’s just over what we see. And it fills the silence so our thoughts can never fully take over. Because we're so used to our thoughts judging us instead of being kind to us.

A few hours on Instagram might seem harmless. But what are we giving away in that time? The chance to feel close to someone? The pleasure of reading a chapter of a book? The stillness we keep saying we don’t have time for? The moments that, stitched together, are our lives.

So, here are some questions for you to consider:

1) When was the last time you actually treated your time as a valuable resource?

2) What if you treated your health-- physical, mental, and emotional--as a non-negotiable part of your life? What would shift in your daily routine, your priorities, and your sense of well-being if you stopped thinking of rest, recovery, and self-care as optional?

3) When you say “I don’t have time,” what are you really avoiding and what might you be afraid to face in the silence?

4) What parts of your life feel most alive and how often do you give them your time and energy?

5) If time was measured by us saying yes to some things and no to others, what are you saying yes to and as a result, what are you saying no to?

I am fully aware that these questions may seem time-consuming to answer when you have a mountain of bills to pay, when you're a single parent struggling to make ends meet and having to care for your children at the same time. I am fully aware that having the time to consider these questions is a luxury in and of itself. Not all of us are in a position to make choices for ourselves. But here's something to consider--even those who make seven figures a year will say the same as those who make 4 or 5: that they don't have the time to stop.

What we’re really chasing isn’t time or money--it’s the feeling of being good enough, of being safe, of finally being allowed to stop proving ourselves. But that feeling doesn’t come with a bigger pay cheque, it comes when we start taking responsibility for the beliefs we’ve internalised about what we owe the world just to be enough; about what feeling safe actually means and looks like. And here’s the double-edged sword: the very fear that drives us to achieve can also keep us locked in survival mode, too consumed to question what we’re really running from.

As Oliver Burkeman writes in his book we have, if we're lucky, some 4000 weeks to live from the time we are born. I have approximately 1,508 weeks left if I am to make it to 80. When my son was born, amidst the sleep deprivation, a throught struck me. I may just have 18 summers with him. Now at the age of nine, we may just have 9 left before he decides he wants to use that time to be with his friends or to give it to work. When I look at it that way it changes the perspective of how I see time. It makes it more acute and more finite. It goes to show just how oblivious I, and most of us are, in thinking we have all the time in the world to do everything we want to do, not to mention everything we have to do.

Nothing quite illustrates the futility of catching time than the sand in an hour glass. Whatever time we have is whatever time we have. But we can change how we see it and value it. Appreciating time, recognising its limits, knowing its value, and not giving it away freely, is an inside job. When we realise we can’t do it all (and who would want to anyway?), we take the pressure off ourselves to appear "successful". We take responsibility for how we spend our hours—not by cramming more in, but by being more intentional with less. We get back in the driver's seat of our lives and confidently protect our time.

It will feel uncomfortable at first. Excruciatingly so. It may feel like you're losing control and diving head first into the pits of fear where failure and disappointment reside. But slowly, if you just hold on, if you give yourself the grace and compassion to not listen to that voice telling you you are on the road to destruction, you will find your way to making it all work your way because it feels good to do so. That good feeling? That's your real voice.

In her 2015 memoir 'Year of Yes, the powerhouse television producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes wrote, "the world doesn’t give you what you deserve; it gives you what you fight for.” For me, it is choosing every single day to direct my time and energy to make this life work; the life where I feel I am doing work that is a reflection of my values, my skills, and what the world truly needs--and doing it my way. I have learned that it takes just as much time and energy to work in a way that practically kills you as it is to muster up all the fortitude and belief to build a personal and professional life that nourishes you. So I choose the latter and even on the toughest, most challenging of days where every bit of positivity is knocked out of me, I hold on to that.

Another way to make time count for you is to "oversimplify" your life. It's a term the actor Jeremy Renner talks about when discussing his perspective on life after his long rehabilitation from being crushed by a snow plough that almost killed him (he did die before he was resuscitated). He says, "It's a way of zooming out and focusing...'What do I give value to?' It's changed since the accident. There's a lot of white noise I've released. I oversimplify life because it is just that simple. Living in that space is quite peaceful, joyful, clean life."

And yes, I hear what you're saying: “It’s easy to say when you're a famous actor and the bills are paid.” Fair. Because the freedom to reflect on time isn’t always equally distributed. But when even the most successful and wealthiest CEOs and celebrities tell me that time is a luxury for them too I have to wonder, what are missing here?

Maybe what we’re missing isn’t more time—but the courage to live like it matters. The courage to say out loud what matters. Because when all is said and done, time is the only currency that can’t be replenished. How we spend and with whom will ultimately define what kind of life we’ve lived.

Monita xo