You Don’t Get 86,400 Seconds a Day. Much of Your Time Already Belongs to Someone Else

There is a well-known story in which you receive €86,400 in a bank account every morning. You can spend the money that day, but you cannot save or transfer any of it. At midnight, whatever remains disappears. The following morning, another €86,400 arrives, until the bank suddenly decides to close the account without warning.

The money represents the 86,400 seconds in a day. Whatever you fail to use today will not be returned tomorrow.

It is a powerful comparison. It is also only half true.

You do receive 86,400 seconds every day, but you cannot spend all of them freely. You need to sleep, eat, shower, work, travel, recover and care for others. A child waking up in the middle of the night does not ask permission to take some of your time. An employer does not refund the hours spent in a meeting that turned out to be completely pointless. And when you are ill, you cannot simply decide to spend those hours on something else.

Some of your time is necessary. Some of it has been consciously promised. Another part has gradually been claimed by people, expectations and habits without you ever explicitly deciding to give it away.

That is where a much more interesting calculation begins.

She Literally Had No Time for Herself

A woman in a senior position at a company came to me for coaching. I will leave out any details that could make her identifiable, but her story will sound familiar to many leaders.

She told me she felt as if everyone and everything else was running her life.

Her job demanded constant attention. At home, she had two young children, her husband and the dog. She wanted to maintain her friendships and needed regular trips to the hairdresser because she felt her position required her to look the part. Even when she was doing nothing, she was thinking about everything she still needed to do.

“Ben, I literally don’t have a second to myself,” she said. “And there is honestly no other way I can organise it.”

I asked her what she would actually like to have time for.

The silence was deafening.

She looked away, thought for a long time and eventually said:

“Well, I don’t really know. But I don’t have time for it anyway.”

A large part of her problem was contained in that one sentence. She wanted more time for herself, but she had never decided what that time was supposed to give her. She knew exactly who needed something from her, but she did not know what she wanted to protect space for.

“If you don’t know what you want to make time for, you have no reason to remove anything else.” Ben Steenstra

When you do not know what you want to do with your time, almost everything that feels urgent will win. An email wins. A meeting wins. The hairdresser wins. A colleague’s request wins. An argument at home wins. Even automatically reaching for your phone wins, because that requires less direction than making a conscious choice.

How Much of Your Time Is Truly Yours?

Dutch time-use research shows that almost half of an average week is spent sleeping and on personal care. Approximately a quarter is spent on paid work, household tasks and care responsibilities. There is also leisure time, but this does not automatically consist of hours over which someone has complete freedom. Social commitments, travel, recovery and family responsibilities cut across these categories. Research from the Netherlands Institute for Social Research also shows that time use differs considerably between men, women, employees, parents and people in different stages of life.

A calculation suggesting that everyone has a fixed number of freely available seconds each day therefore tells us very little. A single entrepreneur without children has a different day from a mother with two young children. Someone in good health has a different relationship with time from someone caring for an ill family member.

Yet, even within these limitations, there is usually an area where we have more influence than we think. This influence may not involve the number of obligations we face. It can involve how we respond to them, which expectations we accept and how much time we continue to give to patterns that offer us nothing in return.

That distinction became visible when I asked my client about her relationship.

A Conflict Also Takes the Time You Continue to Give It

I asked whether she loved her husband.

“Yes, of course,” she replied immediately.

“Do you enjoy having a good time together?”

She confirmed that without hesitation.

“Do you argue often?”

She nodded. Sometimes twice a week. Afterwards, they regularly spent an entire evening or even a full day barely speaking to each other. It consumed her energy, she told me. During work, the argument continued to occupy her thoughts. At home, she could feel the tension before either of them had said a word.

“Do you choose that, or does it just happen?” I asked.

“It just happens.”

“What would happen if you chose not to argue? Full stop. And if a conflict did occur, what if you immediately decided that it would not be given the rest of the evening and the following day?”

At first, she looked at me in disbelief. Slowly, her expression softened. I allowed the silence to remain.

“Well,” she eventually said, “that is also a choice I have. That is also a way I can decide to spend my time.”

I was not suggesting that she could single-handedly prevent every disagreement. You cannot control what your partner says or does. You can decide whether you continue feeding a conflict, how many hours you are willing to spend proving that you are right and whether an argument automatically means ignoring each other the following day.

Research involving married couples shows that conflict does not stop affecting us when the conversation ends. Partners may still be ruminating about it hours later and can continue experiencing physical stress. In a study involving 107 married couples, mutually satisfying relationships and greater use of “we” language were associated with less rumination after conflict, greater feelings of closeness and more favourable physiological responses. The researchers therefore examined not only what happened during the argument, but also its emotional and relational aftermath.

A twenty-minute argument can take over an entire evening, disturb a night’s sleep and consume part of the following working day. The conflict then no longer costs twenty minutes. It might cost twenty thousand seconds.

That is also how we spend time.

When You Don’t Know What You Want, Everything Feels Necessary

My client was genuinely being pulled in many directions. Two young children require time. A responsible position cannot always be contained within office hours. A dog needs to be walked and a relationship needs attention.

But not everything on her list was equally unavoidable.

Some of it consisted of expectations she had never reconsidered. Some came from the image she believed she had to maintain as a successful woman, partner, mother and friend. Another part disappeared into conflicts and rumination that, according to her, “just happened”.

The word must is deceptive. As soon as you say you must do something, you no longer have to examine who created the rule, what would happen if you broke it and whether the price is still worth the outcome.

Using your time consciously therefore begins with direction. What do you want to protect time for? A better relationship? Rest? Your health? Starting a business? A book that has been in your head for years? A conversation with someone you miss? Or simply an hour in which nobody needs anything from you?

Purpose begins with knowing what truly matters to you. Without that direction, your calendar will mainly be filled with other people’s priorities.

Research supports the idea that time matters not only in quantity, but also in meaning. In a longitudinal study involving approximately one thousand graduates, those who valued time over money were, on average, happier one year later. They were more likely to choose activities they found intrinsically rewarding. The relationship remained after researchers accounted for factors including previous happiness, income and materialism. Read the research on time, life choices and well-being.

Another study involving 6,271 participants from the United States, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands found that people who spent money on time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction. In the experimental part of the study, working adults felt happier after spending money on something that saved time than after making a material purchase. The researchers describe this as buying time.

This does not mean that everyone should immediately hire a cleaner, dog walker or personal assistant. It does show that time pressure does not automatically disappear when you earn more, work harder or become more efficient. Sometimes we use our growing resources to take on even more obligations.

Time for Yourself Is Not an Empty Space in Your Calendar

“Time for myself” sounds attractive, but remains empty until you know what you want from it.

If my client had freed up two hours a week without knowing what those hours were for, her work, phone or family would probably have reclaimed them within days. An empty space in your calendar does not protect itself.

Rest is not inherently pointless. An hour spent floating on an inflatable mattress can be more valuable than an hour spent efficiently answering emails. Doing nothing can offer recovery. A conversation with your partner can be more valuable than a completed task list. The value of time is not determined exclusively by how much you produce.

The same applies to relationships. Long-term research shows that meaningful social relationships are strongly associated with health, happiness and longevity. Using your time more consciously does not automatically mean spending more of it alone. It may mean creating more space for the relationships that contribute to growing older, happier and healthier.

Feeling cheerful and living a meaningful life are not the same. You can have a day filled with pleasant experiences and still feel empty in the evening. You can also have a difficult day that later proves deeply valuable. This is closely connected to choosing purpose over ambition and temporary rewards.

Using your time consciously does not mean that every second must be useful, productive or enjoyable. If it did, you would turn your life into another optimisation project and still end up being controlled, only this time by your own planning.

How Do You Take Back Some of Your Time?

Do not begin with another calendar app. Start by looking at your current calendar as if it belonged to someone else.

Then ask yourself five questions:

1. Which parts of my time are genuinely necessary for work, care, sleep and recovery?

2. Which expectations am I meeting without still knowing why?

3. Which recurring conflicts, worries and irritations repeatedly take hours from my life?

4. What would I genuinely want to protect time for if I recovered two hours every week?

5. What am I willing to stop doing to make that time available?

The final question matters most. Everyone wants more time, but almost nobody wants to let anything go. Without ending, limiting, delegating or deprioritising something, “time for myself” usually remains an intention.

My client did not need to resign from her job, give away her dog or stop seeing her friends. She first needed to recognise that her calendar was not exclusively the result of things happening to her. Her own choices, beliefs, conflicts and unspoken rules were recorded in it as well.

You receive 86,400 new seconds every morning. A large part is already needed or promised. Another part is consciously given to people who matter to you. But seconds also disappear into expectations and patterns you never truly chose.

You are allowed to reconsider those.

“Your calendar is more than a schedule of your time. It is a draft version of your life.” Ben Steenstra

About the author

Ben Steenstra is an entrepreneur, executive coach, author and AI sparring partner. He helps entrepreneurs and leaders find clarity in their business, leadership and personal lives. Learn more about Ben Steenstra or start a conversation with AI Ben.