For Product Managers, the core dilemma – one I see many fresh PMs struggle with – is how to allocate your time. You only have 40 (ha!) hours in a working week, so what should you do with them?

In The Four-Hour Work Week Tim Ferriss tells a story about a Mexican fisherman and an American businessman. Not many people know that there is actually a second half to this fable. I was lucky enough to hear it from a wandering shaman in a Berlin nightclub, and with his permission I have reproduced it here.

It just struck me the other day: our main units of time are a hodgepodge of those determined by an external reality and those that are completely arbitrary. And since time is such a central concept to how we organise our lives in the modern world, it makes me wonder how life would be different if we changed the units…