Are You Wasting Your Time?

Yeah, yeah. I know – life is short. We should get busy trying not to waste it. But – is that exactly what we are doing by being busy – wasting it?

Well, Yes. And No.

These days, everybody is OBSESSED with time management. It’s all busy this, productive that and the person who complains the most, and sleeps the least wins. And where, my friend, is the fun in that? The German economist, Max Weber, blames the industrial revolution, pinpointing this as the time when we began to equate being productive with being good. Leading to the misguided belief that the busier we are, the better we are.

The problem is, it’s not really a TIME management issue. It’s an ATTENTION management issue.

Merlin Mann is an excellent case in point. In 2009, Mann, a blogger specializing in time management, announced he was writing a book, Inbox Zero , to teach you ‘how to reclaim your email, your attention and your life.’ Mann spent two years on the project, before realizing that all the time he’d spent looking at ways to save it, meant he’d wasted precious moments with his own daughter growing up. The book never happened, his blog ‘cannot be reached’ and Mann presumably stopped micromanaging his life and completely missing the point.

‘To pay attention to one thing means we don’t pay attention to something else. Attention is a limited capacity resource.’ Daniel Levitan – The Organised Mind. 

Which is why I went to watch a movie with my son, at 10am (!), last Wednesday. I had a lot to do. Work stuff. But, honestly, in the grand scheme of things – cheese-ball alert – what could be more important than spending a morning in the dark, eating popcorn with my boy?

Ah, the grand scheme of things! Don’t worry – I am not going to harp on about those famous deathbed regrets – ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard!’ But, I do think there are two rather sensible ways we can look at the time we have, and how we choose to spend it.

Day-to-Day and In-the-Grand-Scheme.

First up, Day-to-Day – the 24 glorious hours we are gifted on rotation, ad infinitum, until we die. To minimize wastage, Michael Brews, author of The Power of When, suggests we adjust our daily schedule to suit our unique biological rhythm. You can take his test to find out what your chronotype is, Dolphin, Lion, Bear or Wolf and then tweak your timings accordingly.

For instance, the majority of us are most productive in the first two hrs of waking – so, if you’re up at 7am, then 8-10.30 am is your glory time. This is not the time for getting lost down the email rabbit hole, catching up on life admin or scheduling unnecessary meetings. This is the time to get your sh*t done – dig in, minimize micro-distractions and commit to the stuff that really matters. The definition of true productivity is not being ‘Busy!’ all the time. It is about using your energy accordingly and not wasting it on the stuff that drains it – negative people, endless news updates, the social media vortex and comparison with others.

That said, a little bit of time wasting never hurt anyone. In fact, breaks and downtime are essential to generate fresh ideas with research showing that even when we are just ‘daydreaming’, the areas of our brain associated with complex problem-solving are hard at work. Many creative geniuses, from Charles Darwin to Charles Dickens, only spent 4-5 hours a day ‘working’, leaving the remaining twenty to spend as they damn well pleased. Even if you are restricted by ‘regular’ office hours, spend a further 8 sleeping, that still leaves you with plenty of change from the remaining 8 hours (!), after factoring in your commute, meals and mundane chores.

That is essentially 8 hours of ‘free time’ every-single-day! So, make your days count. Listen to music on the bus to work (save checking emails for company time). Exercise to celebrate what your body can do, instead of making it a punishment for something you ate. Enjoy and share your food with family and friends, with all screens far from reach. Don’t spend the week wishing it was already Friday (it’s not Monday’s fault that its nobodies favourite). And if there is something you want to do, learn or try, then schedule it in- because, let’s be honest, you do have time.

‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.’ Annie Dillard

Laura Vanderkam, gave a popular TED talk called ‘How to gain control of your free time’ in which she reminds us ‘time is a choice’. One we make every single day. Instead of stressing about ways to save time, we should be concentrating on what are PRIORITIES are because , ‘We don’t build the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want and then time saves itself.’ Say, what? Essentially, time is ELASTIC. It’s the same as Parkinson’s Law (the idea that work expands to fit the time allotted) and is a reminder that we should adjust our focus accordingly. Because, ‘we can not make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put in to it.’ Choose wisely and PS. You do have time.

The other way to look at time is, In-the-Grand-Scheme. This is particularly helpful if you are a bit hard on yourself (‘I’ve wasted so much time watching Game of Thrones’) or particularly prone to panic (‘I’ve ruined my chance at a meaningful career by leaving it way too late’). By taking a longer term view of life and appreciating the massive expanse of time it really offers us – around 82 years at last count – we can breathe a little easier. So, you watched every episode of Game of Thrones? So what! That only used up 2 days, 21 hours and 13 minutes of your entire life. That still leaves you with 27,306 days to play with.

Or, what about if you had kids in your 20’s, tried a bunch of different things and didn’t really find out what you wanted to ‘be’ until your 40’s (Errr – Me!), does that mean you wasted all that time? Not if you look at it In-The-Grand-Scheme. Because, not everything important in life will give you prestige, prizes or letters after your name. The things that really matter are harder to quantify – great friendships, worthwhile experiences, lasting memories, taco Tuesdays.

In-The-Grand-Scheme is also worth pulling out the bag whenever life starts lobbing you lemons. When your kid is screaming at 3am. When your boss is mad. When your train is late. When your screen cracks. Does this annoying, endless, scary, frustrating thing really matter – you, know, In-The-Grand-Scheme? Probs not. So, don’t stress. You do have time.

As for me? – well by this online calculation, I have about 41 years left on earth. That’s 14,965 days. Running out of time? Who are you kidding?

I never run anywhere!

This GET HAPPIER post is brought to you by somebody who has definitely spent some time wasted.

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