A Letter to the Next Three Years

I started this book standing in a doorway with my bag on my shoulder, trying to figure out where five years had gone. I'm ending it sitting at a desk in a new house, in a walkable neighbourhood, with my kids asleep upstairs and the feeling that something has shifted.

Not everything. I'm still the same person with the same tendencies. I still reach for my phone more than I should. I still say yes to things I should decline. I still have a campervan in the driveway that needs selling and a list of obligations that's longer than it should be.

But I understand the problem now in a way I didn't before. And understanding changes the experience even before the behaviour catches up.

I know that time isn't actually speeding up. My brain is processing less per moment, encoding less per day, and producing thinner memories as a result. The years compress because the raw material is sparse, not because the clock is fast.

I know that my heartbeat is keeping time, and that a stressed, rigid nervous system produces a faster, blurrier experience than a calm, flexible one. I know that my body and my sense of time share neural real estate, and that what I do with my body directly changes what I feel with my mind.

I know that routine is efficient and temporal compression is the cost of that efficiency. I know that novelty doesn't mean adventure. It means deviation from prediction. I know that even small, regular deviations keep the encoding machinery alive.

I know that the scarcity I feel isn't in the clock. It's in my bandwidth. And bandwidth is a structural problem, not a willpower problem.

I know that awe is available every day, that play isn't childish, that purpose isn't optional, and that facing the finite nature of my time doesn't produce panic but clarity.

And I know that I can't slow time down. But I can make it thicker.

Here's what I'm taking into the next three years.

I'm going to breathe at a measured pace each morning while the kettle boils. Not because it's a habit I enjoy, but because the data says it changes my nervous system in ways I can measure and feel.

I'm going to end my showers with cold water and sit in the brightest part of the house with my coffee. Fifteen minutes of physiological input that costs me nothing I wasn't already spending.

I'm going to walk. I moved house partly for this reason, and now I need to use the architecture I built. Walk the kids to school. Walk to get coffee. Walk to think. Walk to feel my body in space, which is how my brain knows that time is passing.

I'm going to protect my mornings for deep work and stop pretending I can do meaningful thinking at 3pm. I'm going to batch my communication and protect blocks of uninterrupted time, because depth is what time is made of, and depth requires continuity.

I'm going to close the week every Friday. Ten minutes of writing down what was distinctive. Not what was productive. What was different. And I'm going to name each month, so my memory has chapters to retrieve.

I'm going to maintain a novelty diet. One small new thing per day. One substantial engagement per week. One genuine first per month. And I'm going to rotate rather than accumulate, giving myself permission to set things down when they've run their course.

I'm going to look for awe twice a week and stop treating the world as a solved problem.

I'm going to play. Without a goal. Without optimising. Without feeling like I should be doing something more useful.

I'm going to keep selling the campervan, keep simplifying, keep closing loops that consume bandwidth without producing value. Every open loop I close is attention freed. Every structural drain I remove is time reclaimed.

And I'm going to write. Because writing this book has been, unexpectedly, the thickest time I've experienced in years. Every chapter required attention, novelty, depth, and purpose. Every chapter left a distinct mark. The process of understanding how time works has changed my experience of time while doing it.

I don't know if all of this will stick. I've tried things before. They've faded. But I think this time is different, because this time I understand the mechanisms. I'm not following advice on faith. I'm acting on a model that makes sense to me. And when things fade, as they will, I have the model to diagnose why and the framework to recalibrate.

Three years. Roughly 1,100 days. Each one can be thick or thin.

I used to think five years was a long time. I want to feel that way again.

This book is my attempt. What follows is yours.

When you're ready, start with one thing. Not everything. One lever, adjusted. One practice, adopted. One structural drain, closed. Give it a month. See if the month feels longer than the one before.

If it does, you'll know what to do next.