If there’s one phrase I truly despise, it’s “I don’t have time.” This phrase should be reserved only for those facing imminent death. For everyone else, it’s merely an excuse—a way to avoid admitting they have different priorities and are perhaps ashamed to acknowledge them.

It’s perfectly normal to deprioritize things that don’t matter to us. After all, why fill our lives with activities we don’t want to do? We naturally optimize for enjoyment and avoid what doesn’t appeal to us.¹ We excel at optimizing the short term: every waking moment, we subconsciously choose what we believe will maximize our enjoyment in that specific second. Sometime external forces push us to do things we wouldn’t like to do. We don’t like to work, but we like to eat, so we work even if we don’t like it, so that we can eat later. But nobody would accept a boring unfulfilling job if they had a vault full of galleons. We only do things that bring us pleasure in the moment or are a necessary drudgery allowing access to some future pleasure. But this drudgery is rarely a majority of our waking time—most likely it occupies roughly 50% of our waking time.

That’s why answering any sort of invitation or request with “I don’t have time” is a bullshit of cardinal magnitude. The truth is, we do have time—we simply choose to spend it differently. I used to think I didn’t have time to exercise, but eventually, I found it. How? By adjusting my priorities and eliminating activities that previously ranked higher on my list. When faced with the feeling that you “don’t have time,” you have two options:

1. Reduce priority of something for which you do have time.
2. Find a more efficient way to accomplish your current tasks, thereby freeing up time.

The first option is straightforward. For instance, if you spend four hours a day scrolling through social media but claim you can’t find time for a walk, it’s clear you’ve made a choice. Time isn’t the issue; it’s your responsibility for setting priorities—not some nebulous concept of “time” being in short supply.

The second option is more intriguing. It might involve small adjustments, like listening to an audiobook instead of reading a physical one, or running to and from work instead of driving. This way, you can literally create time where it wasn’t before.

If you’re unwilling to do either of these, that’s fine. Just, for the love of God, stop using the excuse of “I don’t have time.” Admit openly that you’d rather do something else. Don’t claim you “have to” tend to your garden instead of spending time with your grandchildren. You chose to have an elaborate garden; no external force dictated that. It’s a choice you made, and one you could change if you wanted. So please, don’t act as if you lack free will, your preferences are clear to everyone else even if they’re not stated out loud.

Footnotes

1. Some people are particularly bad at optimizing for long term. By prioritizing for the short term, we frequently spend time on things that make us miserable in the long term. Without this fascinating flaw in human design, there would be no Facebook, no beer, no dumplings and no heroin, among many other things. ↩