There it is again, the voice in your head: “there just isn’t any more time in my life”. And then the shaking head confirmation from your friend: “yeah, I know – not enough hours in the day”.
So, here’s the truth: There are only 24 hours in the day and all we can control is how we spend them.
Of course, it’s nice and easy for me to sit here and type that – offering true, but un-actionable, observations and comments on the problems of those around us is generally easy but not always much help.
How do we get to a state where we are spending at least some of our time better?
I look at this problem in three stages:
How can I start to reuse some time slots in my day/week/month more effectively?
How do I know what I want to spend my time doing?
How do I make sure I spend my time effectively?
I’ll touch on the first in this blog and the second and third in follow up ones shortly. I’m also committed to write deeper, blogs on other areas.
Observation
Changing how we decide to use our time takes some discipline, almost certainly needing us to put some new habits in place. Let’s start with finding the time we can most easily use differently.
Challenge
I’d like to challenge you to reuse some of the time slots in your normal week to get more value from the time, starting with the time slots where you chose what you do.
For this to work, you need to be honest with yourself about where the value, to you, of your current activities is not that great. I’m not judging your decisions, arguably no one should be, but to move forwards, we need to free up time to do things that move us forwards :-)
You may feel that how you spend all your time is totally dictated to you by others, but I suspect that there are many hours in a week where that is not strictly true. We’ll get on to ideas on how to improve your activity for slots where you don’t control the activity choice in another blog.
OK. I’d like you start by assigning a monetary value to a minute of your time. A “made up, easy for maths” value, not based on the actual per hour value of your income stream. Maybe £1, $5, €2, HK$25 or 10 Zloty - whatever value makes sense in your life, in the currency you live with.
Then look through your normal week and focus on the slots where you control 90-100% of the choice of what you do in that slot. Be really disciplined here – some slots might feel like you can’t choose what you do, but actually you have quite a bit of choice (any commute time is a great example)
Describe each of those time slots by saying how much invested “time money” you “spent” on that choice and if you can how it made you feel. I recommend writing them down, physically.
Here are some examples, each using a different “per minute value” just to make them resonate with different individuals – for your exercise, just use the “per minute value” that you chose:
I spend £120 @ £1/hr on 2 hours of that netflix series most evenings.
I spend $100 @ $5/hr on 20 mins during my commute on improving my Candy Crush skills.
I spend €180 at €2/hr on a 1.5 hour weekend lie in again and feel stressed that I won’t have time to do the things I want to / need to.
I bet you get the picture.
Re-framing the time choices like this might help you decide to watch only £60-worth of time on one episode, after doing something else more valuable with that “£60” in the first hour
Or maybe Candy Crush gets removed from your phone, replaced with a different app / activity you do on your commute for your “$100” spent there, twice every day.
The third idea begins to move us into the other half of the approach – “What will we do if we decide we can spend some time differently each day/week/month?”
In my experience this starts with having a few medium term goals in your life, probably two or three, which direct your activities towards the vision of how you want your life to be different.
That sentence may have caused you to feel a bit crushed: “oh no, not the dreaded annual work goal setting” and “where do I want to be in 5 years? Goodness, no idea!” Fair enough – in my experience, goal setting in the work place is rarely done well.
But this is not a corporate training course, nor a meeting with your line manager. The next article will start to unpick this aspect by starting with helping you understand how you currently want your life to be.
I hope after performing this blog’s challenge you will find your 'newly found’ time can be used to focus on understanding where your passion lies!