“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a good deal of it.” — Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Seneca wrote those words around 49 AD. He was writing to his father-in-law, Paulinus, a man consumed by administrative work — meetings, reports, obligations that felt urgent but added up to nothing. Seneca’s point was brutal in its simplicity: life feels short because you are spending it on the wrong things.

Two thousand years later, you are Paulinus. So am I.

Spend a week tracking where your engineering hours actually go. Not where you think they go — where they go. Most people come back with the same answer: a startling fraction of it is noise. Standups that stretch into retrospectives nobody asked for. Slack threads that produce no decision. Pull request comment threads that debate naming conventions for forty-five minutes. A refactoring branch you’ve been “almost done with” for three weeks. Three-hour debugging sessions on a system you should have retired six months ago.

Seneca’s diagnosis fits exactly: the calendar is full, but very little of substance is being done. And the instinct — especially in tech — is to conclude that there simply isn’t enough time. There isn’t enough time to write tests. There isn’t enough time to document. There isn’t enough time to think carefully about the architecture before building.

That’s the lie. There is time. You are wasting it.

This isn’t a productivity lecture. Seneca wasn’t interested in squeezing more tasks into fewer hours. His point was different, and sharper: most people never examine what they are giving their time to. They mistake activity for progress, busyness for purpose. They end up at the end of a day — or a career — unable to name what they actually built that mattered.

What does Stoicism prescribe here? Not a new tool. Not a time-boxing method. It prescribes examination.

The Stoics called this memento mori — remember that you will die — but they didn’t mean it as a motivational poster. They meant it as a filtering mechanism. If you held in mind that your time is finite and genuinely irretrievable, would you agree to that meeting? Would you spend the afternoon on a problem that no one is waiting for you to solve? Would you let a vague fear of missing out keep you pinned to a Slack channel you’re not contributing to?

Probably not.

Seneca watched Rome’s most powerful men exhaust themselves in service of other people’s opinions, other people’s priorities, other people’s emergencies. The modern equivalent is the engineer who is always available, always responsive, always context-switching — and who, after five years, has nothing they’d call their own work to point to.

The goal isn’t to be productive in the conventional sense. The goal is to spend your hours on things that are, by your own honest judgment, worth spending them on. That requires two uncomfortable steps: deciding what actually matters to you, and then saying no to everything that competes with it.

Neither step is comfortable. Both are necessary.

There is a technical practice that maps cleanly onto this. Engineers call it ruthless prioritization, but the term undersells it — “ruthless” implies aggression, when what’s really needed is honesty. Before you pick up a task, before you attend a meeting, before you context-switch into a new problem, ask: if I knew I had half the time I think I have, would I still do this?

Most of the time, the answer reveals exactly what you already knew but weren’t willing to say out loud.

One concrete practice for today:

At the end of your workday, write down — honestly, not charitably — the three things that consumed the most time. Then ask: did this make something better that actually needed to be better? If the answer is no for two out of three, you now know what tomorrow’s first decision needs to be.

Seneca didn’t say time was precious. He said we act as though it isn’t — and that the distance between those two stances is where a life is lost.

Don’t let the sprint board become your life.