Tick, tock. They say time is money, that is, time should be looked at as a resource. Often times, this is associated with doing things with more purpose or intent and quicker. There are really only two ways to spend your time – wasting or investing. With those two costly ways to spend your time, let’s do a quick inventory of how you can either waste or invest your time. Consider a cleaning inventory to assess and evaluate what it is that you waste or invest your time in. You can’t do both.
Ask yourself the following questions for each of the categories:
What does it look like to waste my time in/with ______?
What does it mean to invest my time in [my] ______?
- People – Think about the 5 people (or groups of people) that you surround yourself with most frequently. This could be friends, family, collogues, church, etc. Are they supportive? Are they toxic?
- Development & Learning – In our adult life, we should continue education to grow. The great think about adult learning is the sky is the limit and we choose what we want information we want to learn and grow from. Ask yourself, do I dedicate time in the day for personal/professional growth? Does learning come first or second behind other things like social media and reality television? If so, see bad habits, below.
- Career – Are you passionate about what you do? If you are, what does that feel and look like? If not, what can you do to discover what you are passionate about and set actionable steps to make a change?
- Routine Activities – If someone asks you what you do for fun, how do you respond? Do your top 3 routine activities include that? Let’s say it’s work/school, fitness, and traveling, do they bring you happiness, boredom, or stress? If these are daily activities, you should enjoy them. Reconsider your routine activities if they do not bring joy into your life.
- Bad Habits – We all have them. Identify three bad habits that are in your life. Think of an exit plan to minimize and eventually get rid of them, permanently. Remember “we are a product of the choices we make, not the circumstances we make”.
- Money – How do you approach and react to money? Do you budget? Do you have financial goals for this month, year, and the next 3-5 years? If not, why not? Money does indeed make the world go round’, having a grip on the good and bad ways to waste and invest money (like time) should be important to you.
- Physical Environment – What are you surrounding like? Are they full of clutter and noise or organization and peace? You may not realize the impact of your physical environment and surrounding on your mind and body.
- Health – What are you doing to improve you over health and well-being? This includes physcial, mental and spiritual health. Assess your eating habits, your thoughts and your connection with God or other spiritual connection.
Time can be defined as a quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience. Basically, time is one of the single most important things in your life. Sure, there are different social and physical factors that affect how we spend out time, but at the end of the day, we all have the same amount of time in a day. Think about how you spend your time. Do you waste your precious time or invest it?