Do you often find yourself upset because you can’t find the time to do that thing you want? There’s gotta be a better way! I’m here to tell you there is.
Recently it dawned on me that I spend a lot of my time wishing I had more time to do the things I want. But when I really looked at it, I found a disconnect between what’s important to me and how I spend my time. Here’s what I did to override my default free time and direct my time back towards activities that were more important to me.
Why reconsider your default free time? ⏲
A lot has been written about time and efficiency. Just this weekend I was listening to a couple podcasts and independently they both (a,b) happened to mention that time is our most limited commodity. If you haven’t sat down and thought about how you spend your time, odds are that you’re either a perfect human or you’re living your life on auto-pilot. For me, it was the latter. Auto-pilot sounds bad, but I wasn’t particularly upset with how I was spending my time. I spent a lot of time doing things I liked to do, watching Survivor, playing Fortnite and spending quality time with my wife planning our next trip to Walt Disney World. But, were these really the things I wanted to consume all my free time? No. Ultimately what made me look at this a little closer were a combination of a) my work as project manager (I have a tendency to seek out problems to solve), b) a thing coach Saban said in the Art of Coaching and c) I was finding myself more and more preoccupied thinking about things I wanted to do that I couldn’t seem to find the time for.
How are you spending your time today? 🔍
To start, consider what your default options are today. If you have a career or school, odds are that those obligations are fairly time-structured. Let’s shelve those and consider the unstructured time. For me that’s my nights and weekends outside of work. Spend a few minutes thinking about how you spend your time. The point isn’t to list everything you do. What are the main activities where you spend your time? If you’re like me, you spend a lot of your time on high comfort, low value activities. For me these were Fortnite and content consumption (e.g. TV, movies…
