What to do with your time
How finding purpose is about facing our mortality
What would you do if you had only months to live?
That’s the question at the heart of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, a film that deeply influenced my quest for purpose. It’s the story of Kanji, a dull bureaucrat who has spent decades shuffling papers in a soulless office. But when he gets diagnosed with terminal cancer, he awakens to the emptiness of his life and sets out to make his final days matter.
We so often mythologize what purpose is. We think of it as a cosmic mission statement. Or as that one special job we were born to do. Or as a perfect intersection of our talents, passions, and the world’s needs…
But in reality, these narrow definitions mean we keep searching for a unicorn and we keep feeling incomplete. What if we’ve overcomplicated the whole thing? What if it’s actually about something far more practical, yet equally profound?
Purpose, so hard to define in life, comes clearly in focus when we’re close to death. After his diagnosis, Kenji knew what he had failed to consider for 30 years. It comes down to a deceptively simple question: what to do with the time we have left?
In a way, we’re all terminally ill. Our incurable malady is time. And it will kill us, sooner or later — hopefully later. This makes the question relevant for everyone, you included.
So for this week’s essay, let’s talk about purpose as a framework for how to spend your time well.
Your list
We have an innate desire to spend our time well. As always, that desire comes from evolution. If your ancestors were hungry, they went searching for food. Those that went for a swim instead, had a rather unpleasant time starving to death. The better we spent our time, the better we survived.
That’s how we became so obsessed with setting goals and finding the optimal actions to reach them. This goes for food as well as anything less survival-related. We hate all activities that don’t appear to get us closer to our goals. We hate wasting time.
So soon enough in our youth, we start creating an implicit ranking in our heads for what’s worth our time and what isn’t. I bet traffic jams are near the bottom for you, as they are for all of us. And nobody likes filling out needless paperwork either.
Once we get past those universally disliked activities, it gets more personal. You may think breeding poodles isn’t the most appealing spend of your time, but others may consider it their greatest passion.
One of my biggest dislikes is large music festivals. I know lots of people like them, but I’ll put them at the bottom of my list.
Whatever’s near the bottom for you, I bet it was easy to come up with. We’re quite good at knowing what we hate doing.
As we progress up the hierarchy, to somewhere in the middle, you’d find on my list things like cleaning my house and cooking food. I don’t think they’re a waste of time. But I also know they are not peak experiences.
Finally, we get to the top part. That’s the main challenge for most of us. What should go there?
Finding your purpose is about filling that section with a select few activities that will bring you the bulk of your life’s meaning and fulfillment.
Think of it like one of those tier lists people make. Recently, I did one with my friend. We placed our favorite ingredients in ranked buckets, the top one being S-tier (S for Superior). For me, salmon, cheese, and potatoes were some of the items I ranked the highest. Finding purpose involves filling your S-tier bucket with a tiny few of your most loved, important, and meaningful activities.
Now, you might think I’m giving you the classic “do more of what you love” talk. But I’m not. While I do think you should do more of your S-tier items and even design your life around them, that’s not the main point of the exercise. There’s a far more important part…
Deciding what fits
It’s not about the activities you rate highest — it’s about your reasons why. I’ll explain:
Do you know this baby puzzle? You must drop a set of little blocks through their matching holes. Well, finding your purpose is a harder variant. In this adult version, you must put blocks of the right shape (i.e. purposeful activities) into your S-tier bucket.
But, at first, it’s not about the blocks at all. It’s about the shape of the holes. It’s your main task to define those shapes. You must come up with selection criteria for what sorts of activities can fit into your S-tier bucket and which ones can’t.
I’ll take myself as an example to make this clearer. Here are some of the criteria I’ve found for my S-tier bucket: I want to be close to nature, have full control over my time, and make things with creativity and excellence. I have a few more, but you get the point.
Note that I didn’t say “I want to be a nature photographer” or “I want to be a mountain guide.” Those are specific activities. We’re not, at first, so interested in those.
The randomness of life
It’s useful to define these criteria, instead of specific activities, because it’s a hedge against tunnel vision. There are many more opportunities in the world than you are aware of right now. Some don’t even exist yet. Your set of criteria helps you keep an open mind about any opportunities you come across that you didn’t even know of. That’s why you must focus on the criteria and not on the activities themselves. You simply can’t know of all the wonderful opportunities that you might cross paths with in the future.
Currently, I’m thinking of exploring woodworking as a hobby because it fits my S-tier criteria. But maybe tomorrow, a good friend suggests taking a pottery class. Well, that happens to fit my criteria too. I know that both might have the makings of S-tier bucket activities for me.
By working with a set of criteria, you allow for the wonderful randomness of life to act in your favor. You’ll be primed to take advantage should the right kind of opportunity present itself — anything that fits your criteria.
In addition, life is messy. Some of what you want will not happen. Other things won’t play out the way you expect. If you remain dead-set on pursuing specific activities, you might come away disappointed. But maintaining a set of criteria makes you flexible. If one path doesn’t work out, you can walk along a parallel one instead that still fits with your overall life aims.
Research backs this up. As long as a chosen career is mostly in the right direction, people grow into it. Their passion and commitment expand over time. There is no single, divine kind of work you were meant to do. Lots of activities will fit you just fine when you get properly into them. In my case, pottery and woodworking may seem different, but who’s to say I couldn’t develop a passion for either of them? After all, both are in alignment with what I value and who I wish to become.
Finding criteria instead of specific activities becomes a mindset about purpose. It’s a practical reflection of the fact that life is better when it’s not planned out in detail. You’re open to unexpected opportunities. You can handle changing circumstances. And you won’t get so fixated on singular outcomes.
Finding answers
None of this means you must always remain uncommitted, nor that you need to have an “anything goes” kind of attitude. Most activities will not fit you. They will never be S-tier.
But there are still many potential candidates that could be. It’s your task to define their characteristics. And once you’ve found a good few candidates, go explore them. Commit if they fit you well.
So that’s how you can find out what to do with your remaining time. The answers may come in unexpected ways. That’s great, if not outright encouraged.
In the movie we started this article with, Kanji looks in all the obvious places first. But his final answer is an unexpected one: build the small playground that had been stuck in bureaucratic limbo for years. It found him only when he opened up to the opportunity. And that’s all it takes.