Avarice of Time

In Edward Gibbon's amazing work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon describes the equally amazing emperor Julian the Apostate as exhibiting 'avarice of time'.  Julian only ruled for 19 months, but in that time he achieved a huge number of remarkable achievements.  He wrote a book , Against the Galileans, which was so influential it had to be banned by a later emperor.  That wasn't his only literary exercise.  He wrote quite a lot of other stuff too - I recommend his hymn to Cybele.  He attempted to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.  He overturned the empire's religion and prepared a huge invasion of Persia.   It was in the campaign against Persia that he was tragically killed.  The thing he really should have done was write a book revealing his secrets of time management.


Avarice of time was how Gibbon described the way that Julian always seemed to be on the move doing something.  I think it was something that was particularly on his mind, because Gibbon too squeezed a lot out of his life.  Just reading his six volume masterpiece feels like something of an achievement.  To have written out such a huge book long hand would have been a drain on most people's lives and energy.  To have completed it to such a high standard is one of those things that makes you wonder how he could have done it.

I think the clue is in a remark that by chance someone wrote down.  When one of the volumes was published a copy was passed to the Duke of Gloucester, the aristocratic patron who was funding it.  "Another damn thick square book.  Always scribble, scribble, scribble eh Mr Gibbon?"

I think the clue is there.  He was always working his vast project. That was how it got finished.  And that I think is how anything worth doing gets done.  The trick is to have a plan, know what you are going to do and then just make sure that you spend as much time as you can on actually getting it done.

What I find is that I end up dithering away most of most days.  If I don't have a pretty good plan of what I going to do it is so easy just to let the time drift away in enjoyable but not particularly productive activities.  It is so easy.  It is a bit like the ready availability of junk food makes a lot of us fat, the ready availability of snippets on Youtube, mildly intriguing blog posts and e-mails can sap our time away.  What we need is avarice of time.  Squirrel it away and get as much out of it as you can.