Cliche of cliches, time really does fly. The years since major life landmarks don’t even sound right to me anymore. My son is already 2 years old. I graduated from my undergraduate 5 years ago. Over a decade has passed since I went to spend a couple years in Brazil.

The time elapse from major life landmarks really cause you to pause, but equally disconcerting is when you stop to consider how you used all that time. How have I allocated the past 80,000+ hours of my life?

It turns out, almost all of it is used on some routine or other. A big chunk goes to sleep, another chunk to work/school. Those are the obvious huge time sinks in life. But there are many less obvious routines that nevertheless sponge up the hours of your life. Just recently, I’ve started to seriously reckon with the long-term time cost of even small habits and routines in my life.

Consider something that you do every day that takes only a minute–let’s say flossing. That one minute daily translates into 6 hours over a year, and 60 hours over a decade. It adds up fast! Meanwhile something that takes an hour daily–say, playing video games–translates into 5 months of your life after a decade.

All that is to say, even small habits and routines add up quickly. Something that seems small, done repeatedly, will cumulatively take up an unexpectedly large chunk of your life. Given that, I think it’s worth the effort to reflect on even small routines. Almost always, our habits are things we sort of “fall into.” They’re the path of least resistance. Because of that, we can inadvertently persist in habits that we don’t really want for years, losing hours of our life on something we never wanted.

So consider what routines are worth tweaking. Can you make a routine more effective? Done in less time? Are there things you’d rather stop altogether?

I’ve been attempting to do these types of inventories in my own life. One habit I particularly dislike is I check social media very shortly after waking up, typically about 5 minutes. It’s sort of a lottery that skews negative–sometimes I see something interesting, but mostly it’s just plain stupid or disheartening. It usually is a bad start to my day, and keeps me from getting to actual high leverage morning stuff, like exercise.

I should note that I don’t see this as “productivity hack” nonsense. Life isn’t there to be optimized. Not everything should be a “productive” use of time. There’s room for downtime, relaxing, playing, being “wasteful”. The point here is it’s worth being mindful of your default activities, and make changes as necessary. Being a tiny bit deliberate with a routine–making it easier, more enjoyable, more fruitful, take less time–can yield huge returns.