This morning someone told me I’d have more time if I stopped going to my singing lessons.
It probably wasn’t meant the way I heard it.
But it hit a nerve.
Not because of the singing.
Because it made me realise how often we sacrifice the very things that keep us going.
I was already having one of those days.
The kind where your to-do list has become your personality.
Multiple companies.
Technical support because someone’s on holiday.
HMRC deadlines.
Property maintenance.
Dogs.
Garden.
Emails.
Phone calls.
The sort of day where, before you’ve finished one job, three more have arrived.
Then somebody calls.
You answer while trying to make your first meal of the day and tidy the kitchen at the same time.
Eventually they say,
“I hope later you’re in a better mood.”
Well…
Of course I was in a mood.
Not because of the phone call.
Because I was carrying six different jobs in my head before the phone even rang.
Later came the suggestion.
“You’d have more time if you didn’t go to your singing lesson.”
That was the moment I lost it.
Because that isn’t creating more time.
That’s removing one of the few things that gives me energy in the first place.
I’ve realised we do this all the time.
When life becomes busy, we don’t usually ask:
“How do I eliminate the unnecessary work?”
We ask:
“What part of my life can I give up?”
Exercise.
Reading.
Music.
Walking.
Time with family.
The things that make us feel human somehow become optional.
Email never does.
Admin never does.
Meetings never do.
The things draining us survive.
The things restoring us disappear.
Twenty-five years ago I became a software engineer because music didn’t pay the bills.
Software fed the bowl.
Music fed the soul.
I’ve said that many times.
But today I realised something else.
Those two things were never competing.
One made the other possible.
Without software, I couldn’t have afforded to keep making music.
Without music, I’m not sure I’d still enjoy writing software.
That’s probably why I’ve become obsessed with Behaviour Engineering.
People assume I’m trying to automate work.
I’m not.
I’m trying to automate the things that stop me doing the work that matters.
Or the things that stop me living.
I don’t want AI to replace my singing lesson.
I want it to replace the repetitive email, the context switching, the admin, the endless little jobs that consume hours without creating anything.
I don’t want another hour to work.
I want another hour to breathe.
It’s funny how quickly we accept that technology should make us more productive.
We rarely ask what that productivity is for.
If the answer is simply…
“So I can do even more work.”
…then we’ve missed the point.
Surely the point is to reclaim the parts of life that we keep pushing into tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
There’s a word.
As a songwriter, I once wrote these lines:
“Tomorrow, we’ve no time for tomorrow. Our love is here and now.
Tomorrow we start over again, with a love that never ends.”
Perhaps that’s what today reminded me.
There will always be another email.
Another deadline.
Another phone call.
Another crisis.
The work never finishes.
If we’re not careful, we’ll keep sacrificing the things that make us who we are in the hope that one day we’ll have time to get them back.
I’m no longer convinced that day ever arrives.
So don’t cut the singing lesson.
Cut the things that make you think you have to.