Try to take money from a professional and you will meet procedure: budgets, approvals, a signature chain. Try to take an hour from the same person and you need only a calendar invite with no agenda. The money is guarded like property. The hour is handed to anyone who asks.
Seneca, writing around the year 49 in the essay On the Shortness of Life, found this exact asymmetry in Roman life and called it what it is: a failure of accounting. People who would never let a stranger walk off with their coins, he observed, let acquaintances, obligations and idle claimants walk off with their days — and time is the one possession that is genuinely and only yours. Money lost can return. Property changes hands and changes back. The hour taken is gone with a completeness nothing else in your ledger can match, and it was the only asset you were spending down from the moment you had it.
His famous opening move is to reject the complaint that life is short. Life is long enough, he argues, and generously given; it looks short because so much of it is confiscated — by people who want your presence rather than your attention, by busyness that fills the day without belonging to you, and above all by deferral, the habit of living as if the meaningful part starts later. The man who tells you he will start living properly at fifty has promised away decades he does not own to a future he cannot guarantee.
Audit the confiscations
The method is an audit, and he is specific about its unflinching tone: go through your time as a creditor goes through accounts. Take a real week of your calendar — not the ideal week, the last one — and mark every block with an honest answer to one question: who was this hour actually for? Some belong to the work only you can do. Some belong to people you genuinely owe. And some large remainder was simply claimed — the meeting attended out of politeness, the recurring review that outlived its decision, the discussion joined because declining felt rude. That remainder is the confiscated estate.
Then treat requests for your time with the procedure you already apply to money. Not hostility — procedure. What is this for, what does it need from me specifically, what would happen if I did not attend? A budget-holder who asked those questions about spending would be called responsible. Asked about a calendar invite, the same questions feel transgressive, which tells you how deep the asymmetry runs.
Seneca's sharpest instrument is the retrospective one: ask who has taken the most of your time this year, and what they gave you for it. Almost nobody can name the total. He thought that ignorance was the whole disease — nobody would tolerate not knowing where their money went.
Watch out for
The audit can curdle into meanness. Read narrowly, this method produces the colleague who guards every minute, attends nothing, and mistakes unavailability for depth — and collaboration genuinely requires hours that look unproductive on any single person's ledger. Seneca's target was time confiscated without return, not time given; he wrote thousands of letters mentoring a younger friend, which is not the practice of a man hoarding minutes.
His own accounts are also fair game. He preached detachment from fortune while amassing one of Rome's great private estates, and his critics said so at the time. Read him as a precise diagnostician of a failure he shared, not as a life to copy — the argument stands on its logic, which is exactly how he asked to be read.
Answer this next
Looking at last week's calendar honestly: which single recurring claim on your hours returns the least — and what procedure, if any, would a request to renew it have to pass?
