The demand on our time is ever so increasing. We do not seem to have 24hrs hours in a day anymore. The day turns into night so quickly, many of us can hardly come to terms with the day before it runs out. We have been handcuffed by unplanned meetings, chores, obligations, phone calls, whatsapp messages, social media and other distractions that innocently tiptoe into our day and we seem to genuinely lack the capacity to control or wriggle out of them. As we see off each day and thankfully welcomes the next, we are running out of time and one day, we will run out of it completely.
I am becoming very protective of my time these days with the heightened resolve to defend it than I have ever done. My end goal is to be accountable to myself as much as possible for every hour at the end of every day when I reflect on the day. It means that I must be in control of how my time is used up or at a minimum, be aware of how it is misused even when I cannot control how it is used. I must stay aware and alert.
We often label our misused time as wasted time. I choose to call it stolen time. This change in vocabulary is significant for me to effect the change I want to make in my life. Everyone gets angry when something is stolen from him but not as much when something of yours is wasted. Anyone (even your best friend) who steals from you is a thief and the emotional surge that accompanies losing something to a thief can be very intense because a thief does not mean well. However, you are unlikely to have the same intense emotional surge if a friend wastes your time because subconsciously your friend usually means well. And your response will be to let it go without necessarily making sure that it doesn’t happen again. But when something is stolen from you, you could be so angry with yourself for not properly safeguarding it and your response is to immediately begin to do what it takes to protect whatever is left of it. Sometimes labeling some behaviors or habits with strong words trigger the right behavioral change in you.
When you begin to consider the misuse of your time as stolen time and not merely wasted time, everyone including yourself becomes an enemy of your time when it is misused. Your best friend who spends longer on that phone with you than she should, becomes a thief of your time and you will not allow it to happen again.
But how do you determine what is useful and what is not? Frequent long phone calls with a friend might be misuse of my time but a very good use of someone else’s time. It is all a matter of priority. And no one’s priority is misplaced unless the person judges it so. Your priority is influenced by your goals in life which are drawn from the things that matter most to your impact and personal success. This will be different for everyone.
But you will never know how much time is being stolen from you until you know what your goals are in every sphere of your life – personal, professional, family, spiritual, social etc. When you have identified your goals and clarified what priorities should be engaging your time daily to drive you towards these goals, you can effectively discern what is misuse of your time and what is not. You are then in a good position to determine what I call “priority-creeps” – the things that are outside your priorities but keeps creeping into your day demanding your attention. Those things that places the handcuffs on you.
We must be alert to catch priority-creeps that tiptoe into our schedule daily and plan to safeguard ourselves against them. You must be aware of them and consciously work at gaining some control and taking the cuffs off. Some of them could be out of your direct control. Example is work-related priority creeps that is assigned to you impromptu by your boss. If it is from your boss, then it should not be strictly classified a priority creep but perhaps part of your priorities. But don’t we all sometimes participate in meetings just because we were invited when we could have skipped? Don’t we get into meetings with no prior agenda and specific intended outcomes? Don’t we spend a bit too long at lunch or by the coffee machine? Don’t we accept interruptions from colleagues when we are in the middle of something important to us because our colleague thinks he has something of importance to him?
Stolen time can be subtle and come in different forms. In every 24hrs, you can lose up to 5hrs to priority creeps that you could do without. Being very simplistic, if you take away 8hrs of sleep and 8hrs of paid work or studies, you have additional 8hrs of the day left. When you averagely allocate 3hrs for essential personal tasks like eating, personal devotion, personal hygiene, daily routine chores, exercising etc then you have 5 more hours a day that you can consciously decide how to deploy it. This is what I call 5 discretionary hours. For some, this will mean time spent with family including kids and homework, driving to/fro (in traffic), working extra or studying extra, spending time with friends, screen time (TV etc), phone calls/messaging, reading, church or social activities etc. All or some of these are justifiable activities depending on who you are and what your goals or circumstances are. Some might still think this 5hrs of discretionary time is not enough. But the real change comes with having the awareness that you have approximately this amount of time that you can directly decide what to use them for that moves you towards your personal goals and success. There is a huge difference in having that awareness and being deliberate about it versus not having that awareness and allowing the priority creeps to manage your time. And if you are very adept at dealing with some of the non-essentials that tiptoe into your 8hrs of work or studies, you can make a lot of time savings on that time to handle other tasks that will free up more of your 5 discretionary hours. Then you have the weekends where you have full 13 discretionary hours (ie 5 + 8 hours) but with their own demands on your time such as church services, recreation, rehearsals, weddings, funerals, outdooring, cooking, groceries etc. But strictly speaking, these are still discretionary time and within your sphere of control.
Don’t get me wrong – those 5hrs are not free, they are simply 5 hours at your near-direct-discretionary control. We can split heads about it but this is your time that no matter how complicated your situation is, you can choose to allocate it the way you want. Someone might argue, I spend 2hrs in traffic where I have no control. Yes, but what can you do extra within those 2 hours in traffic – there tons of ideas I may point to in my next blogpost. But going back to my earlier assertion of stolen time and the emotions that such mindset should trigger, what can you do about this traffic situation if you are really angry about losing so much of your time on the road daily commuting to and from work? That is 10hrs of lost time a week which is a full working day. That will be 52 working days a year that is lost if you don’t do anything else within this period or do nothing about it.
In this post, I only aim to highlight the awareness of the leakage of your time and to provoke you to be protective of it. I will be doing a few blogposts on the time resource and how we can try to redeem what is left of it. Never become subservient to the popular notion that you don’t have enough time or 24hrs a day isn’t enough. Be resolved to break the cuffs on your time and bail yourself out of the conviction that you don’t have time – you do!
