A recurrent theme among the blogs I subscribe to seems to be "what would you do if you knew you only had X time to live?"  If you really knew how much time you had left, would you waste so much of it?

Some people might find it macabre, but Kevin Kelly outlines a way to calculate how many days you have left based on Life Expectancy Tables. Using that information (and using my last birthday as a base) I calculated I have 13,813 days left to live.  I took Box of Crayon's advice and put a countdown timer on my desktop that shows me how many days I have left.  It surprised me how motivating that number is.

For example, I don't have a lot of work to do today - and none of it is urgent.  Usually I would stretch the work I have out to fill the day by doing a little, checking Facebook, do a little more work, check out Stumble Upon, do a little more... you get the idea.  I actually started to do that, but then I saw my countdown time and decided to take today off from work completely.  I expect more work in tomorrow and I'm far more productive when I have a lot to do.

Instead of frittering away the majority of today, I'm working on some of my non-work related goals, like blogging daily, taking a walk, working on some neglected classes, cleaning house.  By day's end I should feel better about my day than I would have if I'd just gone through my regular routine.  I won't have wasted all that precious time.

The other amazing thing about looking at how long you have is best described in Kevin Kelly's own words:

My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?