Time. It is our single most valuable resource. Not money, as so many believe. Money can be made, created, and leveraged. Time cannot. Time simply is. Second by second, millisecond by millisecond, hour by hour it drifts away and nothing in man’s knowledge or control can stop, change, or affect this at all. Yet so many people spend time as if it is a frivolous thing.
Something to fritter away, without concern. We’ve all heard the expression “wasting time”, an expression that doesn’t have nearly the negative connotation that “wasting money” does. And on one level this lack of concern with time makes sense. For most of human history time wasn’t as constrained as it is now. Everyone, even the lowest pauper had time to spend watching the wind blow through the trees so to speak. Now the richest men in the world have less time than the pauper did.
Second time is given to us freely. We are born into this world without having to pay much of anything. And then we are given a lifespan freely, a gift essentially. And like all free things, it is not appreciated. What is given freely is not valued. And time is given freely and therefore not valued. Which is a shame because time, like many other things given freely, has tremendously value.
If we would just take the time and see.
How You Spend Your Time…
Says who you are and even more than that what you do and do not value. Words are cheap, thoughts even cheaper, it’s only actions that define and make who you are. What you spend your time doing is the single greatest statement of what you value and who you are. We often have a vision of ourselves in our mind being a certain. An idealized image so to speak. Maybe we think we’re headed for greatness in a certain respect or we see ourselves as being a certain way.
Yet maybe we aren’t headed for greatness at all and how we see ourselves is nothing but an illusion. But how to know? How to know if that is true? The first thing to do is look at how you spend your time. Now I don’t mean how you spend your time in your head. If you ask the average person how they spend their time they’re going to list the few good things they do and cut out all the bad, but that doesn’t do us much good. We have to see how we really spend our time.
Which can be very sobering.
You need to measure your time, at least for a week but a month would be better. Get a notebook and track how you spend your time each and every day. Yes, it’s exhausting, especially at first but the rewards are so sweet it’s more than worth it. And be honest with yourself. If you spent an hour and a half browsing social media, smoking weed, or looking at porn then write it down. It might sting but the sting will be instructive. See how your time is actually spent.
Measure it, then go on to the next step.
Get Ready To Be Humbled & Sobered
I’ll be the first to admit this isn’t a pretty sight. When we first track all of time we’ll find out just how much of it is wasted or worse than wasted is spent on things that are counterproductive and bad for us. Do it at least for a week and see what your week looks like, try to make it a typical week not a holiday week or a week where a big unusual event is going on. Now look at the notebook, look at the week. How much of your time is spent in good, productive, and healthy ways. I’m not saying you have to be working all the time.
Time spent socializing with friends or playing with your dog is time well spent so long as it doesn’t interfere with other things. But how much of your time is spent how it should be spent? Eighty percent? Highly unlikely, even the most productive people struggle to hit eighty percent consistently. Fifty percent? Twenty percent? Ten? It doesn’t matter where it’s at now, we just need to get a starting point so we can measure how much we improve.
Again, this won’t be pretty and don’t expect it to be. Once you get over how bad it looks start thinking of how to change it. It doesn’t matter where you start so long as you keep moving on the right track day in and day out. Remember the tortoise and the hare. Look for ways to cut out things that aren’t helping you and replace them with things that will.
And that’s a big thing. It’s not enough to just add in good things only or take out bad things only. That creates an imbalance. What you need to do is try to replace to bad with the good. Pick one bad habit that you want to start cutting down on and pick one good habit you want to start increasing. Work on whittling away at one while building up on the other.
The Habit List & Forging Ahead
Make a list of bad habits that you want to get rid off and good habits that you want to replace them with. Don’t try to include all the good habits at once or get rid all of the bad habits at once. That’s not going to do anything but overwhelm you and burn you out. Make the lists. Look at who you want to be and where you want your life to be and what is required to get there. What habits must make up your daily life to achieve your goal? Make a list of them. And then look at how you spent your time and write down all the bad habits that you want to cull.
Pick one from each list and build the good and cull the bad. Once you feel you have a grip on that move on to the next one and the next and the next and so on and so forth. Over time this will change your life, more than anything else could. The more good you cultivate the easier it gets and the more bad you cull the easier it gets. The good and bad news it that starting is often one of the hardest parts when it comes to habits.
Take the first step and you’ll get where you want to go eventually, so long as you don’t stop walking.
