title: "By the Passage of Time"
published: false
canonical_url: https://susiloharjo.web.id/by-the-passage-of-time/
description: "Twenty-four hours is no longer enough. A reflection on information overload, wasted hours, and what Surah Al-Ashr asks of us."
tags: reflection, productivity, faith
Lately I have been feeling like twenty-four hours is not enough. Not because I have too much work, but because every single hour seems to bring something new I want to learn. A new framework. A new tool. A new piece of research. A new opinion from someone I respect. By the time I close one tab, three more have opened in my head. I catch myself doing the math in the shower — sleep seven, work eight, pray and eat and commute, that leaves maybe three or four hours of focused time. Not a lot when the input keeps multiplying.
And yet most people I know are not running out of time. They are running out of attention. They have all the time in the world, and they spend it on things that, if we are being honest, do not move the needle. Endless scrolling on TikTok. Reels until the battery dies. Mobile games that reset every morning. I am not pointing at anyone else here. I have been that person. Sometimes I still am.
So the question I keep coming back to is simple: how do we handle so much information in an era that keeps producing more of it than any one human can absorb, and how do we make sure the time we do have is spent on things that actually matter?
The verse that reframes the question
There is a short surah in the Quran — Surah Al-Ashr, the 103rd chapter — that I keep coming back to. It is only three verses, and in many Muslim traditions it is recited so often that it almost becomes background noise. But the meaning is sharper than I gave it credit for as a younger man.
Wal'asr. Innal insana lafi khusr. Illalladhina amanu wa 'amilus salihati watawasaw bil haqqi watawasaw bis sabr.
By the passage of time. Indeed, mankind is in loss. Except for those who believe, do righteous deeds, and advise each other to truth and to patience.
The structure of the verse is what gets me. It does not say "some people are in loss." It says "mankind is in loss." The default state of being alive, the verse is telling us, is loss. Time is leaking out of us from the moment we are born. Every hour that passes is one we will never get back, and most of us are spending those hours on things that will not survive us.
The exception, the verse says, is narrow. Four conditions stacked together: belief, righteous action, mutual encouragement toward truth, and mutual encouragement toward patience. All four, not three out of four. And two of the four are about other people — tawasi means "you all advise one another." The verse is built for a community, not a solo project.
That last part changed how I think about productivity. The "I will just focus harder and ship more" version of self-improvement is incomplete — the same trap I wrote about in why I stopped optimizing my AI agent and started shipping it. The Quran is asking me to also look left and right and ask whether the people around me are pointed in the same direction.
The choice that defines the era
A friend of mine put it bluntly last week. "We are not in an information age," he said. "We are in a choice age." The information is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the choice of what to do with the next ten minutes.
Every morning I make hundreds of small choices. Phone on the nightstand or across the room. Email first or prayer first. Read the paper or read the long-form article I bookmarked. The pattern they form is the catastrophe, not any single one of them.
I started tracking, for a week, what I actually did with the first hour of my day — not what I planned. Most days, the first sixty minutes were lost to scrolling, to messages, to "let me just check one thing." By the time I got to the work that mattered, it was already past nine and my brain was tired.
The fix was not complicated. It was also not easy. I moved the phone to a different room. I started the morning with the things I actually believe in, not the things the algorithm wanted me to see. The first hour stopped being lost. It became the most valuable hour of the day, and the rest of the day reorganized itself around it.
This is not a productivity hack. It is the same pattern that comes up in one markdown file that made my AI agent 23 points smarter — the smallest unit of attention, repeated daily, compounds. Choosing, with intention, between the thing that feels good in the moment and the thing that builds something that lasts.
Tombo ati and the things we forget
There is a Javanese song — Tombo Ati — that Muslims in Indonesia have been singing for a long time. The full title is Tombo Ati Sekawan Ewu Dinten, roughly "medicine for the heart, four thousand days." It is a list of remedies for a tired soul. The remedies are not what you would expect from a self-help book.
Jangan lupa sholat, jangan lupa baca Quran, jangan lupa sholat malam, berkumpullan dengan orang-orang sholeh, perbanyaklah berpuasa, dan zikir malam perpanjanglah, semoga Gusti Allah mencukupi, semoga sisa umur kita diridhai.
Don't forget to pray. Don't forget to read the Quran. Don't forget the night prayer. Gather with righteous people. Fast often. Extend the night remembrance. May God be enough for you. May the rest of our lives be blessed.
That is the entire prescription. No morning routine optimized to the minute. No cold showers. No journal prompts. Just six things, most of them ancient, all of them free, all of them harder than they sound.
I have been trying to take the song literally, and the resistance is real. The night prayer is the hardest. Gathering with good people requires admitting that I do not already know everything. Fasting regularly means telling my body no when every other voice in my culture is telling it yes. Each one of these is a small war with the version of me that wants to be comfortable.
But the song is not naive. It is not promising that life will be smooth. It is promising that God will be enough — not success, but sufficiency. The metric is "you will not run out of what you actually need," not abundance. That is a more interesting promise, and the only one I can defend after a hard week.
Better than yesterday, that is the target
There is a phrase that has become a kind of motto for me lately. I did not invent it. I am not sure who did. It is this: the goal is to be better today than I was yesterday, and better tomorrow than I was today.
No yearly revenue target. No follower count. No benchmark of being "successful" by anyone else's standard. Just a daily comparison against my own previous self.
It sounds soft when I write it down. In practice it is brutal. "Better" is not a vibe — it is specific. Better at what? Better how? Measurable against what? If I cannot define what better looks like for today, I will not know if I hit it, and the day will blur into the next, and the next, and at the end of the year I will look up and realize I have spent three hundred and sixty-five days being the exact same person.
I have started writing one sentence at the end of each day. Not a journal. Just "Today I did X. Tomorrow I want to do Y." Some days the sentence is embarrassing. Some days I am proud of it. Either way, the day is captured, the hour is accounted for, and the verse in Surah Al-Ashr is no longer a warning I nod at — it is a daily check.
The accountability we do not talk about
The last part of the verse is the one most of us would rather skip. We are going to be held accountable — not in a vague karmic sense, but in a real, personal, no-deflecting way.
When I was younger, I thought accountability was about the big decisions — the career, the marriage, the move. Now I think it is about the small ones. The phone I picked up instead of the book. The meeting I scheduled during the time I had promised to pray. The conversation I avoided because I did not want to be uncomfortable. Those are the ones that add up.
I am writing it at the end of a week where I did some of the things right and a lot of them wrong. I am writing it because the verse keeps coming back, and the song keeps playing in my head, and I am tired of pretending that scrolling is the same as living.
If any of this lands for you — if you are also feeling like twenty-four hours is not enough, and also feeling like you are spending them in ways you cannot quite defend — the next hour is a place to start. Not the next year. Not the next Monday. The next hour.
The verse has been saying this for fourteen hundred years. Time I started listening.
