Time

Every minute you‘re making choices.  Think of the options of saying yes or no to (s)exercise. By saying yes to one activity you’re saying no to a million others.  Yet many men I’ve come across are making choices that prove wasteful, but unfortunately these individuals don’t see that it is this wastefulness that often frustrates them…

Time is a limited entity for all of us.  We have 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, 8760 hours in a year.  If you were to live to be a 100, you’d live 876,000 hours from the moment of your birth to that of your death.  That is not even a million hours in a lifetime.  You’d have to live to 114 to clock up a million hours on this planet. Many of us would like to be able to squeeze more hours out of each day.  We study time management strategies and creative scheduling techniques.  We try to figure out how to do a million things at once…

So how – and with whom – do you want to spend your time?  How do you spend your time now?  A useful exercise is to track for one week how you’re spending your time so that you can see.  One man I coached became aware that he was spending hours surfing the net comparing prices of the same massage treatment.  This time was cutting down on the time he spent with his family, or spent actually enjoying the massage treatment he was after!  He used the information he had gathered to consciously change his habit.

By reading this blog you have voted to give time to personal [and professional] growth, learning, improving the quality and enjoyment of your life.  There’re a zillion ways you could spend these moments.  But here you are.  What values are you voting for by reading these words?

How else can you explore how you use – or waste – your time?

• How do you use your time [in any context of your life]?
• How could you reduce / eliminate the sense of time pressure you feel?
• How do your choices about how you spend time reflect your highest values?
• What have you learnt about yourself with regard to spending time?
• Do you often find yourself rushing around?  What’s the cost of that to you?
• How do you want to spend the time you have left on this planet?

Looking inside ourselves and reevaluating our habits and strategies can be a scary process.  Scary things are scarier when we’re alone to them.  But you may never walk alone – get guidance from coaching! It’ll prove one of the best investments of your time you’ve ever made!