  In a situation like eternal inflation, where our data is replicated at
infinitely-many other space-time events, it is necessary to make a prior
assumption about our location to extract predictions. The principle of
mediocrity entails that we live at asymptotic late times, when the occupational
probabilities of vacua has settled to a near-equilibrium distribution. In this
paper we further develop the idea that we instead exist during the approach to
equilibrium, much earlier than the exponentially-long mixing time. In this case
we are most likely to reside in vacua that are easily accessed dynamically.
Using first-passage statistics, we prove that vacua that maximize their
space-time volume at early times have: 1. maximal ever-hitting probability; 2.
minimal mean first-passage time; and 3. minimal decay rate. These requirements
are succinctly captured by an early-time measure. The idea that we live at
early times is a predictive guiding principle, with many phenomenological
implications. First, our vacuum should lie deep in a funneled region, akin to
folding energy landscapes of proteins. Second, optimal landscape regions are
characterized by relatively short-lived vacua, with lifetime of order the de
Sitter Page time. For our vacuum, this lifetime is $\sim 10^{130}$~years, which
is consistent with the Standard Model estimate due to Higgs metastability.
Third, the measure favors vacua with small, positive vacuum energy. This can
address the cosmological constant problem, provided there are sufficiently many
vacua in the entire ensemble of funnels. As a concrete example, we study the
Bousso-Polchinski lattice of flux vacua, and find that the early-time measure
favors lattices with the fewest number of flux dimensions. This favors
compactifications with a large hierarchy between the lightest modulus and all
other K\"ahler and complex structure moduli.
