The Balancing Act
On making the best use of your time
How are you spending your time?
Time is the biggest resource we have at our disposal. How we spend our time determines the health of our relationships, life, finances, and more. Granted that most of our weekdays are consumed by work, we can tend to go on auto-pilot and devote time to the things and people that demand the most attention without paying attention to how it impacts the quality of our life. Distractions (think social media, TV, mindless internet scrolling, and more) take up time so seamlessly that before you know it, hours, days, and weeks pass by. My point is simple: time is your biggest, finite currency and how you spend it directly impacts your life. Have you considered this?
I want to address the opposing school of thought for a moment. Why try to control time? Our default operational mode is natural. It ensures time is spent towards the path of least resistance. Distractions are easy, fun, and take your mind off things. Why not use it to decompress? That’s fair and there’s no right answer. But, at the end of the day, are you happy with where you are investing your time or do you wish it was different? How many times have you wished you spent a little less time on Insta? How many times did you wish you worked out more, or called your siblings, and cousins more often or worked at getting better at music? And how often have you drowned the sound of these wishes by more distraction, more TV, more of anything?
Today, James Clear’s newsletter was a good reminder to say NO to things, people, and distractions that don’t align with your intentions. While I have thought about saying NO to unwanted work, I forgot about distractions. I caught myself several times today trying to answer one more text, checking my phone once every few minutes, catching up with people’s status and just thinking about the many things I needed to do. It is hard to say NO.
At a wellbeing workshop last year, I filled this simple worksheet that I think can help align priorities and help you time yourself better. I like to call it the “Time Keeper” worksheet. It’s quite simple and can be modified with any categories that are important to you. Fill the rows with “roles you play in life” or “different elements of life” that take up your time.
Time Spent (% or hours/week) | Satisfaction Scale (1-10) | Dial Up or Down?
Spouse
Sibling
Friend
Manager
Student
Parent
Child
Leader
.
.
OR
Hobby
Career
Personal Growth
Health
For each component, write out how much time do you spend and rate how satisfied you are with it, the scale of 1 to 10. For example, you spend 20% of your time with your spouse and have a satisfaction score of 7 while you might be spending 2% of time with your siblings/parents and have a lower satisfaction at 5. Next, rate if you want to dial up or dial down the time you spend on it. The goal is not to get to 10 for everything. It’s more of a balancing act and figuring out where do you want to spend more or less time in exchange for higher overall life satisfaction. Given that you live a busy life, for every category you want to dial up, there will be something that needs to be dialed down. If you have a lot of free time at your disposal, you could dial up more things than you dial down but you might need to let go off distractions.
This ‘Time Keeper’ helped me figure out that I was not spending enough time in some roles and way too much time in roles I thought were important to me but were not at second glance. If you want to take this one step further, you could try changing things and re-fill this sheet to find out how much your satisfaction changed in one category over another. You might be surprised to find that reducing some time in some categories might not drop your satisfaction as much as it increases satisfaction in another category.