Tempus Fugit. Memento Mori. This is an old phrase in the Christian Faith that you don’t hear often anymore. Even in the world that deals with the afterlife, death is an unwelcome subject for so many.

Translated from Latin it means this: Time flies. Remember death.

To Christians, this phrase is used to help focus the followers of Christ – a reminder that this life is very temporary when compared to eternity; and that while it is easy to get swept away in drugs and alcohol, or Netflix, or one-night stands, remember that you only have so much time to get it right before your time is up and your judgment comes.

The phrase has a sort of whimsy to it that caught my attention when I first heard it. Often paired with skull and crossbones, I could imagine a Jack Sparrow type character saying it to me while winking. Like most people, when I first heard this phrase, death wasn’t something I thought of regularly. Nor did I want to. Death is an uncomfortable thing and we tend not to like to think that we too will meet our ends.

But then it occurred to me that even in the secular world, this phrase lives in the works of artists, musicians, filmmakers, and philosophers alike.
​
Think about it for a minute. How many times have you been asked, if this were the last day of your life, what would you do? How would you live your life?

For years I resisted the idea of detailed planning since I so highly value variety and I was convinced that planning would cost more time than it would create.

Recently I’ve been re-working everything I know about planning. I’ve been a meticulous digital calendar user, but I recently switched to writing in an actual planner with pen and paper – the Tony Robbins RPM system to be exact.

I’m deep into my journey and it appears I was right on some level – planning does take a significant amount of time. It may save me some time in the end but that’s not the real benefit to me. The REAL benefit of a high-level planning system isn’t the 15 minutes you spend doing it every day. The real benefit is the clearing out of the mental cobwebs and the reactivity that dominates our brains every day.
​
So many of us live with this daily sense that we’re not doing enough, or we’re doing the wrong thing, or we’re doing too much. Most of us don’t take the time to think about it in detail like this, but that nagging anxiety that plagues many exists precisely because you haven’t come up with a clear, concise vision for your life or your day (you can’t have a clear vision for your day without a clear vision for your life.