On Waste
We get furious when money is wasted but casual when life is. Time is the one resource with no refund — yet most people treat it as if the account is unlimited. Boaz draws a sharp line between rest (which restores life) and waste (which drains it), and gives a 7-question audit to reclaim one hour this week.
What this edition is about
Money lost sets off alarms. An hour lost rarely does. Boaz opens with that asymmetry, because it explains why capable people protect a budget line item far more carefully than they protect the only resource that never refills.
The edition's central distinction is between rest and waste. They can look identical from the outside — both involve not producing — but they move in opposite directions. Rest returns you to your work with something you didn't have before. Waste leaves you emptier than it found you, usually while feeling like relief in the moment.
The piece closes with an audit: a short set of questions designed to surface where the leak actually is, and to reclaim a single hour this week rather than promising a redesigned life you won't deliver.
- Time is the one resource with no refund, yet it's the one we account for least carefully.
- Rest restores capacity; waste drains it. The difference is how you feel afterward, not how it looks.
- Most lost time is not one large hole — it's a slow leak nobody has measured.
- Start by reclaiming one hour this week, not by redesigning the whole calendar.
Leaders and operators whose calendars are full but whose most important work keeps slipping.
This page is a summary. The full edition — with the stories and the detail — lives on Substack.
Read “On Waste”On this edition
Rest gives something back — you return to the work with more capacity than you left with. Waste takes something and returns nothing; it usually feels like relief while it's happening and like regret afterward. Same appearance, opposite direction. Judge it by what you have on the other side.
Audit rather than estimate. For one week, note where the hours actually went instead of where you intended them to go. The gap between the two is the leak, and it's almost never the thing people blame. Then reclaim one hour, prove you can hold it, and go from there.