Newsletter · July 2026

The Time Portfolio

About twenty minutes into my conversation with Thomas Pargett, he described an exercise he runs with clients who are really invested in the conversation: he pulls out a notepad and draws a pie chart. Not of their money. Of their time.

Thomas was the first guest on The Advisor Library, and the book he brought was Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks. The premise is one blunt piece of arithmetic: a long, lucky, healthy life runs about four thousand weeks. That's the whole account. It doesn't compound, and nobody sends you a statement.

The line from Thomas that stuck: by the time a client is sitting across from you, they might have five hundred weeks left. Not five thousand. Same net worth statement, same cash flow, same allocation review, and a completely different conversation available if you let the number into the room.

Most of our meetings answer one question: are you going to run out of money? Fair enough, it's why people hire us. But for the client who's already cleared that hurdle, the one they can't quite put into words is whether they're spending the weeks they have left on the few things they'd tell you they care about most. No planning software prompts that.

The exercise itself is simple. Half your time, what's in it? Then the next quarter, then the last. It does for a calendar what a portfolio review does for a balance sheet. It shows you the drift, the gap between the allocation you'd choose and the one you're actually living.

And notice what never lands on the chart. Nobody sets aside ten percent of their week for cable news, or a quarter of it to refresh the markets. The book has a line for this, by way of the ancient Greeks: distraction was being pulled toward something other than what you claim to value most. If your week doesn't match your list, the problem isn't that you're busy. Your own system has a leak.

Thomas took the AI question somewhere I liked. As the software swallows the allocation and the tax-loss harvesting and the rebalancing, what's left is the thing a model won't do: sit with a person and help them spend four thousand weeks with intention. He's never once calculated a Sharpe ratio in a client meeting. The job was always mostly listening, and telling each other the truth about time.

Which is the uncomfortable part for those of us building firms: if that conversation is the differentiator, are we actually having it, or running the cash flow and walking the client out the door without ever asking how they want to live? Thomas called that second version a failure, and sitting with it after, I think he's right.

We treat our clients' money as finite because it is. Their time is scarcer, and we leave it off the statement. It belongs back on, next to the number that's already there.

The full conversation is Episode 01 of The Advisor Library, "Four Thousand Weeks: Advising in a Finite Life."