The value of our time is the driver for many many cases of heartache and pain. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have issues around time, myself included. If you’ve got it all sorted out you can go back to scrolling facebook or something else.
The most common thing I feel and have heard from others when their time is compromised is anxiety. For me, it’s the number cause of the of anxiety I feel. I don’t have enough. (It’s not being valued. I’m wasting it.) Some other common things we all might feel around time are terror, anger, and resentment.
No matter what you’re feeling it’s your responsibility to address what’s going on in your life to create the life you say you want to have. This will take you from “wanting” to create that life to actually living it.
A couple areas that are ripe for managing that I see are: the specific choices of where you’re spending your time and what I call inappropriate scaling in your life.
In terms of choices, look closely to see where you need to make clearer decisions of what you do with your time. (Ahem… I should be writing this and instead I use that time to surf social media.)
We’re weird creatures. Most of the time, with focus, I can access the part of myself that’s clear on what I actually need to do. I’m amazed at how confused most of us can get when it comes to the choices of where we spend our time. It’s a big challenge to simply stay on the intended task. That other task that I can become distracted into doing probably provides me that hit of dopamine. Doing that enough times and the attention span shrinks to the size of grain of sand. Small!
It’d probably be good to mention that we also have a saboteur that doesn’t sleep and is smarter than you, stronger than you, and faster than you. The trick is to make this part of you an ally.
Scaling is about spending too much time in one area and too little time in another. (You can’t just sleep less so you can work more when you’re already working fourteen hours a day.)
If the cost of where you live is too much, sometimes the solution is not to try to make more money but rather its how to find a home that’s within your budget. Or lets say you make $100/hr and you work seventy hours a week, if you want to make more money the solution is not to work more hours but to try to find a job or opportunity where you make more per hour and maybe even work less hours. So why the hell do you think having more is the solution…
In a 2014 study productivity falls after a person works more that 50 hours a week and after 55 hours productivity drop so much that it’s pointless to keep working. This seems to make a lot of sense to me and feels right. The difference between 55 and 70 hours is that clear example of bad scaling.
The opportunity:
Where are you living beyond your means?
What is the most common place you waste time?
How would your life be different if you quit wasting your time?
Thanks for your time, have a great day!