TASK #5: TIME AND AGAIN
“There is never enough time, unless you’re serving it”. Malcolm Forbes
How do you spend your time? I saw this movie, “About a Boy”, about this guy (Hugh Grant) who leads a wasteful, vacuous life until he meets this kid–the boy–who’s mom is a mess and and he sorta forces himself into Grant’s life and Grant uses the boy as cougar-bait, then he falls in love–you know, now that I’m trying to explain it I realize that it makes no f–ing sense at all, but it’s got a cheerful ending and Rachel Weisz is just awesome.
I spent nearly a 1000 minutes driving, 1680 minutes watching tv. And no minutes having sex. That made me think about my priorities.
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But the reason I bring it up when I thinking about time is because Grant’s character looks at time as units of activity, i.e. a haircut is two units, watching a sitcom is one unit, playing Modern Warfare is ten units (that’s me, not Grant, who didn’t play anything in the movie except a guitar, which he did poorly…)
And that’s how he kept track of his time. Well, I thought that was pretty sensible. I figured that if you kept track of the units then you would know what how your time was spent, and if you knew how it was spent you could figure our how to spend it more wisely. Or not…
So I tried it. But units didn’t work for me, because I had to come up with a structure, and it was too hard. So I decided to look at time–my time, in another way. I started with a week. In one week there are 10,080 minutes. Let me repeat–10,080 minutes.
As you know, once time passes, it’s gone. It ain’t coming back. So how are you spending your 10,080 minutes? Sleeping? Working? Exercising, eating, fooling around, having sex, driving? I wrote down everything I did during a week and how many minutes I spent doing it. For example, I spent nearly a 1000 minutes driving, 1680 minutes watching tv. And no minutes having sex.
That made me think about my priorities.
TASK:
Your task is to introduce yourself to your life. Every minute of it.
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Your task is to introduce yourself to your life. Every minute of it. List every activity that you do in a week, and how much time you spend on each activity, first by hours, then by minutes.
Then, in your notebook, put three columns: WELL SPENT, NOT WASTED, AND WASTED. Then list your activities, and the time spend on them, in the appropriate column.
(NOTE: 56 hours of sleep, or 3360 minutes, goes under NOT WASTED. Any more than that goes under WASTED.)
Pay attention: This is the brick and mortar of your life.
Photo courtesy of the author.