It's Your Life, and It's Ending, 90 Seconds at a Time

Limiting your cycles can be expansive, ignoring them can be expensive

Mar 01, 2025

Throughout my life, I’ve bumped into a recurring theme. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels pretty universal.

Three (3) is broadly accepted as a number with some sort of magic, whether it’s in religion, in science, in mathematics or in sociology, people find comfort and power in the trilogy.

I respect 3, but when seen in patterns it’s more of a superset of 3s. I like 90 for durations, as it is generally long enough to see something but short enough to not be intimidating.

Measuring time in increments of 90 has a beauty to it, allowing you to break it down into 3 groups of 30, a number small enough to make anything possible.

If you consider it as 3 acts, or 3 sides of a triangle, you can see start to be strategic with that time.

90 Seconds - A time to breathe

Pausing your life and focusing on breathing for a simple 90 seconds is an intentional act. Any time when you look at your breathing and pause for the moment is intentional and lets you re-center on yourself.

90 seconds is the smallest increment, therefore the easiest to do, but with the potential to have the farthest reach.

Pausing for 90 seconds by itself is a start, but can you pause intentionally 3 times each day?

90 Minutes - A time to focus

Bringing your attention to a task and letting your mind sink into that flow of activity can be enough to do an entire day’s work, or it could be the time to make progress on a goal or objective. 90 minutes is short enough that you can commit yourself to work without interruption, but long enough that you can make appreciable progress. It’s enough to get into ‘flow state’ and bring purpose and satisfaction.

Set a timer, declare your intention, turn off distractions and start working. With practice, you can DIY a flow state at will.

It’s also notable that the proposed ‘Basic Rest-Activity Cycle’ (BRAC) operates on the approximate 90-minute rhythms in humans, it’s why we often need a break after 90 minutes of focused activity, this also happens while we sleep, the Ultradian rhythm of non-REM/REM sleep.

Hint, try to sleep for a 6, 7.5, or 9 hour period. You’ll feel more rested if you wake naturally after a 90-minute sleep cycle, its in alignment with your Ultradian rhythm!

90 Days - A chance to succeed

Trying to plan out a whole year can be overwhelming, it can also be misleading. 365 days leaves room for a huge margin of error. Create an annual goal if you must, but leave it open to adjustment.

You can make significant progress on any of your goals in 90-day intervals. The beauty of this shorter “long interval” is that it’s long enough for you to test a hypothesis, or see results to confirm your plan.

Alternatively, it’s short enough that you can commit a period of your life to pursue something without it having a negative impact. You can learn to plan an instrument or speak another language, you could learn a skill that changes the course of your life, or you could lay the foundation for a lifelong pursuit as a business or charitable organization.

Inside a 90-day period, you can even create smaller ‘acts’ with a beginning, middle and end. You can set milestones, and you can measure progress as you go.

90 Years - A lifetime

In 90 years, you can tell a tremendous story. Looking at the ‘acts’, the first 30 are your foundation as you move from infancy to adulthood. In your first 30 years, you can hope to spend it learning and growing into yourself. The first act is about learning something.

The second 30, the ‘mid-life’ is when you take that early learning and start to build something. Maybe it’s a family, maybe it’s a community, maybe it’s a business or charity. This middle act is about building something.

Those last 30, if you’re lucky, is when you can take what you’ve learned, what you’ve built, and you can share it with others. Maybe you teach them what you know, maybe you use the time and space you’ve created in your life to help others, or maybe it’s a chance for you to double down on building something with more impact.

At 90 years, you can hope to have lived a full life, ready to move on to whatever is next. Within those 9 decades, you will have the chance to learn, to grow and to potentially create an impact on the world.

While 90 years is an impressive number, many never get the chance to see it, so it can be hard to use as a target or a focal point for living a value driven life.

Everything is optional, or at least malleable

The unfortunate truth is that we don’t all get to start at the same place, so sometimes it takes 40 years from birth before you can move into ‘build mode’, or for some you are literally born into something already built, and your timeline is all messed up.

There are plenty of reasons that it doesn’t work in the prototypical 3 acts, but you always have the ability to reframe.

Perhaps your 30 years of learn coincide with 30 years of building, so it takes 60 years, but then you’re ready to share.

Regardless of the outermost shell, we all have access to our 90-day, or 90-minute, or 90-second cycles, and that gives us the power to adjust the 90-year cycle as we go.

The next step is simply defining those cycles and how they affect your life right now.

Join the Chaos Cooperative!

March is upon us! Chaos Cooperative has opened its doors and is eager to bring new brains into the community.

March in Chaos Cooperative is focused on defining success as it applies to you, yes, you specifically. Nobody can tell you what matters to you, it’s all in your own hands.

Starting on Monday (March 3rd) we start with work sessions looking at what doesn’t work, what’s getting in our way (limiting beliefs? Learned helplessness?) and start a journey of self discovery.

I hope you can join us!

You can join for free today at https://chaoscooperative.com