Rock Unroll
“The bad news is time flies,” goes the saying, “but the good news is that you’re the pilot.” Here's a simple way to claw back some time every day.
All we want is time.
More time in the day, the month, the year and our lives. More time with loved ones. More time on holidays. More time to ourselves.
I’ve had the luxury of time over the last few years to explore how we choose to spend our waking hours as part of the research for my next book on the future of work. And it’s given me a good excuse to track down and speak to some of the most interesting people in the world.
Take Dr Laurie Santos, a Yale professor who specialises in the science of happiness. Her course on how to live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling has become Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years, with almost one out of every four students enrolled. She also hosts The Happiness Lab podcast, which has been downloaded more than 100 million times.
One topic that I asked Laurie about was time. “We often don’t realise how critical time is for our happiness,” Laurie explained. An awareness of the impact of how we spend our time is gaining increasing traction with scientists, with several terms now used to describe how we feel about the time that we have.
There are two ends of the spectrum: time affluence and time famine. Time affluence is your subjective sense that you have some free time for yourself. This is when you feel like you’ve got some time in each day to do the things that you want to do: go to the gym, cook a good meal, or spend quality time with your family.
The opposite of this is time famine, which Laurie describes as “where we are literally starving for time.” This is a familiar feeling for many parents, carers, busy workers and anyone who fills their plate with too many demanding mental items. The negative effect this has on us is immense. “We don’t realise that time famine can cause such a hit to our happiness, and so we often don’t invest in time,” says Laurie. “If you self report as being time famished, that’s as bad for your wellbeing as if you self report being unemployed.”
So how can you get some more time back? One of the ways is by cutting unnecessary things out of your life.
One Useful Thing For October 2023: Unroll.me
Every minute we spend slogging through our email in-box is a minute that we aren’t spending doing something that we love. So I consider it a major victory every time I joyfully unsubscribe from an email newsletter that I no longer read.
To help me with this over the years I’ve used Unroll.
It’s a free service that goes through your entire inbox, and allows you to unsubscribe from emails instantly with a single click. No more wasting time reading things you don’t want to read, or trying to figure out how to get off a mailing list.
The way it works is not by actually taking you off their database, it’s by intercepting the emails before they get to you, which means that can always go into the Unroll dashboard at any time and un-do any of your actions. You can also ask it to “roll-up” a bunch of subscriptions you have into a single email so you can stay across things you want while still minimising the amount of noise you get sent. It’s super useful.
How to use this tool:
Heat To Unroll
Go to Unroll.me and click on whatever email program you use. I use Gmail and the process to set it up its pretty simple. It’s worth noting that Unroll.me has some issues with GDPR, so if you’re from Europe you mightn’t be able to use it, however I had no issues signing up from Spain.
Grant access to your emails
You can do this via giving it a temporary App Password in Gmail, or other ways to connect Outlook, iCloud and other email providers. You can also easily go into settings and turn off the “Measurement Panel Opt-In” if you’re concerned about them using your data. Then let Unroll do its thing, which looks like this:
Choose to keep, unsubscribe or rollup every subscription email
You might be shocked how many things you were subscribed to, but seeing it all in one simple interface is quite magical. I’ll bet you there are dozens of subscriptions that you forgot you signed up to, or weren’t even aware you were still on.
Unroll will then act as a guard between any newsletter subscriptions you get sent and your brain, giving you back valuable minutes every day that really adds up each year.
Knowing that your inbox is clutter-free gives you the same smug sense of satisfaction you get by cleaning out “that drawer” in every house that seems to collect all of the assorted bits and bobs.
Get some time back in your day with this useful tool. And of course, you hopefully know which box to tick when it asks if you want to keep subscribing to timduggan.substack.com :)
We are back in Mallorca, where the weather is just starting to turn ever so slightly after the most magical time of the year when the tourists recede but the sunshine doesn’t. The Christmas lights have been hung all around town, and the end of the year is well in sight.
This week I handed in the umpteenth draft of my next book, and all going well I will be able to share some of it with you next month (fingers and toes crossed). I simply cannot wait.
Until then, have a great month.
Tim