Ten years from now, you'll be ten years older either way. The question is what you'll have to show for it.

That sounds like modern self-help, but it's one of the oldest worries in writing. Around 700 BC, the Greek poet Hesiod was already telling his brother Perses to stop wasting time. Long before anyone talked about compound interest, the ancients had noticed that small habits, kept up or dropped, add up over the years.

Being "ahead of everyone else" is a slippery goal, and I'll come back to that at the end. But if you want to be noticeably further along in a decade, here are five things worth giving up now.

1. Putting things off until tomorrow

Hesiod's advice to his brother was blunt: "Do not put your work off till to-morrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin" (Works and Days 410-413, Hugh G. Evelyn-White's translation).

Elsewhere in the same poem, Hesiod describes the road to goodness. "Between us and Goodness the gods have placed the sweat of our brows," he wrote. The path is "long and steep" and "rough at the first; but when a man has reached the top, then is she easy to reach, though before that she was hard" (Works and Days 289-292).

Hesiod was talking about virtue, but I think the image fits learning almost anything worthwhile. The start is the hardest part, so it's the part we keep postponing. Learning an instrument, saving regularly, or writing the first chapter all feel hardest in the first few weeks.

Pick the one thing you've been saying you'll start "when things settle down." Then give it 15 minutes before today ends. Not the whole plan, just the rough first stretch of road.

2. Rushing work that's meant to last

Plutarch tells a story about two painters of ancient Greece. Agatharchus was "boasting loudly of the speed and ease with which he made his figures." Zeuxis, one of the most celebrated painters of his time, overheard and said: "Mine take, and last, a long time."

Plutarch agreed with him. "Deftness and speed in working do not impart to the work an abiding weight of influence nor an exactness of beauty," he wrote, "whereas the time which is put out to loan in laboriously creating, pays a large and generous interest in the preservation of the creation" (Life of Pericles 13.2, Bernadotte Perrin's translation).

To be fair, Plutarch tells this story while praising the buildings of Pericles' Athens, which went up fast and still stand. Speed isn't the problem. Skipping the care is.

Plenty of things are fine done quickly. The habit worth dropping is skipping the care on the parts that matter. Before you send the report, check the numbers someone will make a decision on. That's where the extra time earns its keep.

3. Treating a bad start as the final verdict

Demosthenes became the most famous orator in ancient Athens. His first attempt didn't go well. According to Plutarch, when he first spoke to the assembly "he was interrupted by their clamours and laughed at for his inexperience." He also had "a certain weakness of voice and indistinctness of speech and shortness of breath."

He didn't quit. He went after each weakness. He "built a subterranean study" and went down into it "every day without exception" to practise, sometimes staying for two or three months, "shaving one side of his head in order that shame might keep him from going abroad." To fix his lisp, he recited speeches with "pebbles in his mouth," and he built up his voice by speaking "while running or going up steep places" (Life of Demosthenes 6-7, 11, Bernadotte Perrin's translation).

Even then, people mocked him. A rival once told him "scoffingly that his arguments smelt of lamp-wicks," meaning he'd clearly stayed up late preparing (8.4). Demosthenes didn't seem to mind. The preparation was the point.

You don't need to shave half your head. But after a presentation goes badly or an interview falls flat, try writing down the two or three specific things that went wrong. "I'm bad at this" is a verdict. "I spoke too fast and lost my place twice" is something you can practise.

4. Letting the in-between hours disappear

Pliny the Elder, the Roman writer behind the enormous Natural History, held high office and still wrote the 37 books of his Natural History, along with several other works. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, explained how. He had books read to him at meals, after his bath and while he traveled.

Once, when a dinner guest made the reader go back and repeat a mispronounced word, the elder Pliny asked whether the guest had understood it the first time. He had. "Why then," Pliny said, "did you make him go back again? We have lost more than ten lines by this interruption." He once took his nephew to task for walking somewhere when he could have been carried in a chair and kept studying. "You need not," he said, "lose these hours." Separately from everything he published, he left his nephew "one hundred and sixty volumes of extracts," his reading notes, written "in very small hand," his nephew recalled (Letters 3.5, William Melmoth's translation, revised by F. C. T. Bosanquet).

That's an extreme example, and I wouldn't copy it. Walks, idle dinners and rest have value of their own. But Pliny saw something most of us miss: the gaps add up.

Take one 20-minute gap in your day, like a commute or the end of a lunch break. Twenty minutes on 300 days adds up to 100 hours a year. You don't have to fill every gap. Pick one and give it to one thing, like an audiobook on a subject you want to understand or a few pages of the language you keep meaning to learn.

5. Envying results you weren't willing to pay for

Epictetus had a simple way of looking at people who seem to be getting ahead. Being invited to dinner, greeted first or asked for advice, he said, all have a price. Some people pay it by flattering and attending on the right people.

"Well, what is the price of lettuces? An obolus perhaps. If then a man gives up the obolus, and receives the lettuces, and if you do not give up the obolus and do not obtain the lettuces, do not suppose that you receive less than he who has got the lettuces; for as he has the lettuces, so you have the obolus which you did not give" (Enchiridion 25, George Long's translation).

The people who seem ahead of you usually paid for it somehow. Sometimes it was flattery. More often it was something honest: early mornings, a move to another city, years of unglamorous practice.

So when you feel left behind, ask which part of their path you'd actually choose. You might want the skill and be willing to practise for it. You might want the promotion but be glad you kept your evenings. Where you wouldn't pay the price, keep your obol.

"Ahead of everyone else" is the wrong scoreboard

There's a catch in the goal itself. Over ten years, "everyone else" keeps moving. Someone will always be further along in some way that matters to you, and some of that comes down to luck, health and timing you don't control.

A better comparison is the person you'd be in ten years if you changed nothing. That's a race you can actually win. Each of these habits is really about that: starting sooner, working with more care, learning from bad starts, using spare time well and choosing which prices you're willing to pay.

One place to start

Write down one thing you'd regret not having started if you looked back ten years from now. Keep it specific: "Read one book on history a month," not "Be more cultured."

Before today ends, give it 15 minutes. Open the book, practise the first chord, or write the first paragraph. Hesiod was right that the beginning is the roughest part. Once you're past it, the road tends to get easier.