Time is Everything

Time is Everything

Time is a vortex.

I recently read a blog article from author Eric O'Neill regarding the fact that "time is everything."  One line caught me..."are you investing or wasting" your time?  That's a question that we can ask on the micro and macro throughout our lives and busy schedules.  It's important that we look at our schedule - daily, weekly, monthly, annually, and in our season of life with an introspection that allows us to get honest about our alignment of values vs practicality.  In other words, this is an audit that looks at our "budget vs actual" of what we say is critical and valuable as compared to what we're actually spending our most valuable resource on.  

Make time for the moments 
in all seasons.

When we look at the micro scale, or our daily/weekly/monthy interactions, it's critical that we get our "to-do list" items done.  Walk the dog.  Feed the kids.  Show up to work.  Pay the bills.  Those things have to happen in order for us to function in our overall system.  That said, those moments and the moments in between have to be utilized wisely and invested strategically.  When we view time as the valuable commodity and store of value that it is, similar to the way we often view money, it begins to take on the gravity it deserves.  Our weekly schedule can easily get eaten up with endless scrolling and autoplay monotony.  Fortunately, all of that is within our control to be efficient.  

Measure.

Similarly, many of the daily living activities now have more efficient options than perhaps any time in history.  Our great-grandparents likely had to plant, steward, and harvest their own food through seasonal toil.  Today, we can sign up economically for grocery delivery from our nearby big-box store...utilizing a fraction of the hours to feed ourselves than our ancestors did.  By examining those small moments that would have otherwise been consumed in yesteryear, we can easily find a start to our more efficient time investments.  Taking that a step further, we can examine our habits, hobbies, and extracurriculars to likely find and free up additional minutes that become hours.  

Practice.

In the great book Atomic Habits, the author talks about how efficiency that can come through wise habits can be powerful.  As you create time in the little moments (e.g., start a load of laundry and fold it while watching a movie), we begin to build a lever we can apply to making meaningful momentum toward our larger time investments.  In what the Money Guys call the "messy middle" part of life, where we're balancing work, raising kids, supporting parents, and everything else, it's easy to let the time slip away...that we can't get back.  We've talked about the pre-req of quality time is quantity time.  In other words, those small "garbage time" moments, as Scott Galloway put it - dinner around the table, driving kids to school, going on a walk - all add up.  

Schedule.

By carving out some efficiency in our schedules, we can invest those saved moments into the moments that matter - read with the kids, play catch, talk with your spouse - build up the proverbial relationship bank through quality...and quantity time.  For many of us, we can likely tweak the equations of life to balance the scales.  Short on cash...cut back or make more.  Short on time...you can't go back and make that up very well.  We were talking the other day and talked about the idea of a barbell-shaped retirement.  In other words, if we hammer it early to build up some investments that can grow, we can then shift gears to spend more time with our kids when they're small.  And, if we need to, sprint again when the kids are up and out to supercharge our way into retirement if needed.  

Prioritize.

This whole thing isn't to say that you should shirk your responsibilities as a provider for your family.  It is to say that you should widen your aperture to more than just measuring that with a paycheck.  In order to provide wholly for our family's needs, we have to build in enough time to be home and be present...not just for the highlight reel.  In order to do so, if we haven't gotten there with the above small systemic changes...the next step is saying "no" to the one-more/too-many-good-things category items.  It'd be great to volunteer for the soup kitchen...it isn't greater than building a bond with your family (but maybe you could win-win by volunteering...with your family).  Anyhow, getting ruthlessly protective and selective within our calendars is critical to ensure our families are our priority.  

Execute.

As we wrap up, this post has been all over the pinball table.  The salient point is that time is everything.  The old cliché "how do you know you're in the good old days before you're out of the good old days" rings true.  It's easy to miss the forest for the trees and live out the Cat's Cradle song where we look back and realize we missed what was really important.  Perhaps this can be a reminder and wake-up call to be present where your feet are at...and work hard to schedule your feet in the right places more often.  

With you in the arena, from ours to yours...Happy Trails!

Call to Action: 

• Pick out a couple of time swaps (one more meeting for one more walk with kids over lunch) that you can make this week...and put them on your schedule.  
• 1 - ___________________ 
• 2 - ___________________
• 3 - ___________________
• Discussion: Consider what you/your family could/would/should (level of commitment) and start/stop/sustain (action) in terms of right-sizing your calendar and schedule this week.

Further Reading, Motivation, and References: 

- Eric O'Neill original article