How Do You Use Your Time?¶
Updated: February 28, 2021
Have you spent an hour in the past year considering how you invest your money? Whether you should invest in index funds or stocks? Setting up a retirement account? Creating a personal budget?
There is one resource I argue is far more important than money.
Your time.
I hope you take 5-10 minutes to read this article to become more aware of how you invest the most important resource of all: time.
If you live as long as the average person, you have been allotted approximately 700,000 hours on this amazing planet of ours.
In these hours, you can accomplish fantastic things. You can make the world a better place. You can do things that improve life for future generations.
Or you can waste these hours.
What you do with your hours is up to you.
The problem is that it is all too easy to think of time as an infinite resource.
It is not.
Time slips away like grains of sand never to return again.
— Robin Sharma, "The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari"
Time is running out. For all of us. Right now. Slowly but surely.
If you don’t make conscious choices about how you want to spend your hours, there is a good chance that society or others will make the choices for you.
In this article, I will encourage you to take back the most important freedom you have as a human being.
The freedom to choose what you want to spend your time on.
The freedom to decide how you invest your most precious resource for the best possible return.
As usual, I will try to break down this hairy problem into concrete actions you can take immediately. I’ve even been nice enough to create a Time Budget Google Sheet that does all the calculations and visualizations for you.
You can get your own copy by entering your email in the box at this link (or filling out the box at the bottom of this page).
This sheet helps you gain a more conscious relationship with how you use your most vital resource in just 5-10 minutes. That’s well-spent time.
Let's get started!
Map Your Priorities¶
The first thing I want you to do is to think about what is important to you in your life at this moment.
Rate the importance of the following categories for you, on a scale from 1 (Not Important) to 10 (Very Important):
- Job/Career/School
- Romantic Relationships
- Family/Household
- Entertainment
- Health
- Spiritual Activities
- Self-Development
- Creative Activities
- Social Relationships
It is entirely natural for your priorities to change throughout different stages of your life. This is why this is an exercise you can revisit regularly as your values and life situation change.
Now comes what can often be an aha experience. It certainly was for me the first time I did the exercise.
Map Your Consumption¶
When I worked as a personal trainer, the first thing I often asked my clients to do was to keep a food diary and map their activity levels.
Logging everything they put in their mouths was an eye-opener for many when they completed the task correctly. Usually, they consumed many more calories than they thought. A couple of slices of bread here, a glass of juice there, a yogurt and a handful of nuts in between. Not to mention a couple of handfuls of chips that often appeared.
Unconscious intake made the difference between whether they gained or lost weight.
In the same way, hidden time spent on unconscious activities can be the source of why you feel you are not utilizing your time well enough.
Now it’s time to become aware of your time usage.
The best approach is to log it daily for a week. This way, you are more likely not to miss hidden time thieves. If you can be completely honest with yourself, you can try to base it on last week.
A gentle reminder:
By entering your email at this link, you can access a template to set up your own time budget. If not now, then when...?
To log time spent, it is more useful to break it down into activities rather than categories. Some activities can impact multiple categories, as we will return to.
You can also log hours spent sleeping, but we will exclude that from the visualizations, as it makes it difficult to see the nuances between the other categories. How much sleep someone needs and what quality means can be the subject of another article. (Extra curious readers can check out "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker.)
Find Kinderegg Activities¶
Some activities are like Kinder Eggs. They can provide benefits in multiple areas at once. Such activities are worth their weight in gold.
For example, work (should?) be a source of both social relationships and self-development, in addition to the job/career/school category. Going for a hike can have an effect on romantic relationships as well as health if you do it with your partner.
One of my favorite tricks is to combine activities that give me returns in several areas. An example here is walking meetings outdoors. By holding meetings while walking outside, I gain physical activity, mental clarity, nature experiences, and deeper relationships with my conversation partner than by sitting in the same conference room with screens and computers nearby. Of course, not all meetings can be conducted this way, but some are worth a lot.
Another example for me is combining easy runs with mindfulness and spiritual development. By ditching earbuds and Strava, I can absorb beautiful nature and become aware of birds, trees, and the sky. It gives an experience with value far beyond the obvious exercise and health benefit.
A final example is dancing with the family. By putting on some music videos on YouTube and having a joint dance/exercise session, we both get some movement, boost our mood, create good relationships, and most importantly, have fun.
What activities can you do that have an effect on several of the desired categories?
Make a list of ideas.
Such activities are key to "hacking" your time consumption.
Yes, I’ve also created support for Kinder Egg activities in the Google Sheet using a simple script that can be run by clicking on "My Scripts" and selecting "select multiple". Future work on the sheet may involve adding support for weighting the impact on the different categories differently. (Any takers? 😉)
Compare¶
Your Time Budget will automatically calculate the difference between what you say you prioritize and what you actually do prioritize.
Categories in green are those you spend more time on than the desired priority. Categories in red are those you spend less time on than the desired priority.
In the example above, we see that the person spends far more time on work and entertainment than their priorities would suggest. At the same time, less time is spent on self-development and spiritual activities.
Hopefully, you now have a more conscious relationship with your actual time consumption.
Did you have any aha moments?
Is there a mismatch between your desired priority and actual consumption?
If self-development is more important to you than entertainment, and you spend 0 hours a week on self-development and 15 hours on entertainment, that should ring a bell.
If health is ranked higher than work and you spend 1 hour a week on exercise and 60 hours a week at work, you should hear a damn alarm!
Where will you be in 10 years if you continue in this direction?
Are you ready to redistribute your time consumption? Let’s get started.
Redistribute¶
The first step to taking back control over your time is to reallocate time spent on categories you say are not so important to those you want to spend more time on.
Entertainment may be an easy start for many. The value of entertainment is not insignificant, but is it worth more than a couple of hours a week? Is time invested in social media or Netflix well-invested time, or could this time be better spent on some of the activities you prioritized higher?
The absolute best swap I made in my life was to trade two hours of "couch time" for two hours in the morning for exercise, journaling, and important work.
What about "empty time," such as commuting? If you commute 1 hour to and from work or school every day, you have 5 hours a week that you can redistribute. Think practically about what might be a good swap here.
If you drive, it might be listening to audiobooks or podcasts on self-development. That's a book per week.
If you take the bus, it could be writing in your journal and planning your day. It might be reading a book.
What do you think provides you with a better long-term return: reading a book a week or playing Candy Crush?
Additionally, you can see if any of the higher-ranked categories are receiving too little allocated time. Health could be a recurring theme here.
Multiplier Activities¶
Time spent on activities such as exercise, sleep, and mindfulness has benefits far beyond the obvious.
I call them multiplier activities.
Multiplier activities give you more energy for all your other activities.
Multiplier activities are good investments of your time.
By reallocating your planned time consumption to your chosen priorities, you have taken a significant and important first step toward becoming a more refined version of yourself.
Conclusion¶
By simply comparing what you want to spend your time on and what you actually spend your time on, you have the foundation for using your time on things that are more important to you.
You have the tools you need to take back control. I hope you have identified some changes you might want to try and then come back to reflect on the effects of those changes over time.
As always, it’s a challenge to do what we know we should do. Don’t give up. The long-term consequences are unimaginable. So are the benefits if you stay the course.
One last small but significant tip:
Don't forget to enjoy this process along the way.
Happiness can never be chased. It must be part of the journey.
Working on becoming better is the journey itself.
Enjoy the journey.
🙏💗💪
Self-Development
Habits